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Algorithms of Oppression

Robert Fantina New York Journal of Books
Search engines aren't the innocent, objective tools they pretend to be. Instead, as author Safiya Umoja Noble argues: “They include decision-making protocols that favor corporate elites and the powerful, and they are implicated in global economic and social inequality.”

Lake Michigan, Scene 6

Daniel Borzutzky Lake Michigan
Chicago poet Daniel Borzutzky blends the surreal with all-too reality in depicting environmental pollution and political corruption.

Tariq Ali on 1968 and Today

(Interview with David Edgar) London Review of Books
Tariq Ali, a key figure in the British New Left of the 1960s and a well-regarded Marxist writer and activist, offers an extended take on the politics and culture of the1968 anticapitalist movements and their echoes in today’s resistance worldwide.

Two Coming-of-Age Films: New York in the ’70s, Paris Today

Eric A. Gordon Hollywood Progressive
Two films depicting a young person’s coming of age are showing on screens now: Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and Le Brio about a young Arab woman in Paris who achieves her dream of becoming a lawyer by overcoming the toxic racism of her law school professor.

Is Television Ready for Angry Women?

Sophie Gilbert The Atlantic
Producer Marti Noxon has two shows about women’s pain and rage debuting this summer—and the timing couldn’t be better.

Egg

By Joyce Peseroff AGNI
An egg is an egg is an egg but in Joyce Peseroff’s subtle poem, an egg is a marker of a person’s social conscience.

Cursing Cortes

Álvaro Enrigue The New York Review of Books
The simple story of Cortés's evisceration of the the Aztecs is not so simple. In letters to Spain's King Carlos I, justifying morally Mexico’s occupation, Cortés distorted what was in fact a messy and confusing war involving several armies from already competing European nations. His lies linger.