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Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘Barracoon’

Angela Helm The Root
This work by Zora Neale Hurston, the famed author of the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), has surfaced after over eight decades. It is the autobiography, as transcribed by Hurston, of the life of one of the last persons enslaved in Africa and brought to this country.

Don’t Cry, Resist! Movies From a Female Revolution

Manohla Dargis New York Times
“Before, I was my father’s Janie,” says this determined woman, who with grit and welfare checks is raising her six children alone in an abject corner of Newark. “And then I was Charlie’s Janie,” she says of her abusive husband. “Now I’m Janie’s Janie.”

Oats

The Nutrition Source editors Harvard T. H. Chan newsletter
Oats contain several components that have been proposed to exert health benefits.
The FDA allows oat food labels to tout the nutritional value and health benefits of oats such as a reduced risk of coronary heart disease, weight and hunger control.

Dear Loan Director

Esther Kamkar Hum of Bees
When a loan officer turned down the poet’s request, she sent him this poem. He changed his mind. Happy Mother’s Day.

New Eugene Debs Film Does the Socialist Proud

Michael Hirsch The Indypendent
Review of a bravura feature length documentary on the life and struggles of militant union leader, socialist orator, five-time presidential candidate against the two-party duopoly and class war prisoner for opposing America’s imperialist entry into World War 1.

Tyrant

Michael Thomas Barry New York Journal of Books
The renowned Renaissance literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt, whose 1980 book, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, was a landmark study, has now turned his attention to Shakespeare's treatment of tyrants. Michael Thomas Barry looks at this new, timely volume.

Post-Shawarma: On Avengers: Infinity War

Aaron Bady Los Angeles Review of Books
If you build an entire movie around MacGuffins, the material embodiment of wanting, insufficiency, and lack; if you fill every beat and narrative space with the problem of those MacGuffins, leaving no space for anything else; if you crush every story down to the problem of how it relates to those M

When a Tuna Fish Sandwich Becomes a Work of Art

Allie Wist Saveur Magazine
A tunafish sandwich on wheat toast, with lettuce and butter, and a large glass of buttermilk.
Food, eating rituals, cooking techniques, and dining habits are all tiny and wonderfully significant daily performances. For one artist, these havits of everday life became the stuff of her art.

Election Noir

Dorothy Barresi What We Did While We Made More Guns
California poet Dorothy Barresi nails a certain candidate on the campaign trail: "tight tense talk & leering merit of American man" and guess who she means.