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Celebrating the Free Jazz Revolution, in Black and White

Michael J. Agovino The Village Voice
This classic treatment of the 1960s-1970s avant-garde jazz in the United States is an essential guide to one of the most dramatic, significant, and fruitful of modern American artistic movements. That movement's impact is still felt in music played in all styles all over the world.

‘Collateral’ Is Essential—and Timely—TV

Alison Herman The Ringer
The British miniseries Collateral, which premiered on Netflix last Friday after an initial run on BBC Two last month, is to a post-Brexit United Kingdom what recent seasons of American Horror Story: Cult, American Crime, and even Broad City are to a post-Trump United States.

Abecedarian Yellow

Dan Vera The Quarry
Poet Dan Vera adds fine-tuned anti-imperial politics to everything you need to know about bananas—and banana republics—from A to Z.

Comic Art in the Academy

Paul Buhle New Politics
Once the provenance of teens, counterculturalists or authors who were fans, comics are now entrenched in academic discourse in what the essayist calls, "the theorizing of a kind of artistic poetics." The book under review ably looks at nonfiction comics as apt reflections on modern social ills.

An American Marriage

Zakiya Harris The Rumpus
This review focuses on a riveting novel about an African American couple caught up in the criminal justice system.

“The Death of Stalin” Captures the Terrifying Absurdity of a Tyrant

Masha Gessen The New Yorker
In January Russia banned “The Death of Stalin". This may have been the first time in post-Soviet history a movie that had already been granted permission to screen was pulled from theatres by order of the government. What made the film so dangerous?

The Wire and the World

Helena Sheehan, Sheamus Sweeney Jacobin
A decade ago, The Wire series finale aired. The show was a Marxist's idea of what TV drama should be.