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The Family

Maxine Scates The American Poetry Review
In Maxine Scates's touching poem, casualties of war are not just soldiers or even surviving soldiers, but the family and its survivors.

Nina Simone's Backlash Blues

John Lahr London Review of Books
A biography of the iconic Nina Simone. Using rare archival footage, audio recordings and interviews (including talks with her daughter and extracts from Simone's private diaries), this examination of her life highlights her musical inventiveness and unwavering quest for racial justice, while laying bare the personal demons that plagued her from the time of her Jim Crow childhood in North Carolina to her self-imposed exiles in Liberia and Paris.

Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

Ashutosh (Ash) Jogalekar The Curious Wavefunction
In what reviewer Ashutosh (Ash) Jogalekar calls a "poignant and beautiful, simple and without frills and from the heart" exposition, Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli guides us through seven of the main ideas of physics. These are, Jogalekar writes, not just ideas that have advanced our understanding of science, but they are also ideas that have "expanded our consciousness and connected us to our origins and future."

Film: The 30 Best LGBT Films of All Time

British Film Institute The Guardian
British Film Institute-Flare: London LGBT Film Festival is 30. Over 100 programmers, critics and filmmakers voted for the 30 greatest LGBT films of all time.

Gastronomical Virtual Reality Experience Allows You to Eat Whatever You Want

Abigail Abesamis Daily Meal
Gastronomical virtual reality experience that simulates different sensations associated with eating may benefit weight loss, allergy and diabetic management, eating therapy, elder and disability care, kids eating habituation, remote dining, alternate reality dining, and space food.

ATX TV Fest: How HBO’s ‘Oz’ and ‘The Wire’ Changed the Game with David Simon and Tom Fontana

Omar L. Gallaga Austin 360
Three showrunners of some of the most influential TV dramas of the so-called golden age of TV shared the stage at the ATX Television Festival Saturday morning at Google Fiber Space, describing the birth of HBO’s original dramas, what it was like to create iconic shows such as “The Wire” and “Homicide: Life on the Street” and why despicable characters still make for great TV.

The Greatest

Michael Castellano Portside
A requiem for a true heavyweight, Muhammad Ali, originally written by Michael Castellano in 1981.

Another Reading of Milanovic: Worlds of Inequality - Globalization's Winners and Losers

Miles Corak The American Prospect
Branko Milanovic offers us not just a plethora of facts about income inequality but brings them into a sound and rigorous global perspective, showing that what are too often treated as isolated national issues are on a world scale income massively maldistributed. While some nations saw the growth of a middle strata (China, for one) the real increase in world income is owned by the unprecedented 50-percent rise in incomes for the top 1 percent globally.

Film: "I, Daniel Blake" - Ken Loach's Shock at the 'Conscious Cruelty' of the Welfare State

Diane Taylor The Guardian
Ken Loach just became the first British director to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes twice, when his welfare state polemic I, Daniel Blake picked up the prize. The 79-year-old film-maker had previously announced he was finished with directing but became so infuriated by the plight of the poor under the current Conservative government that he came out of retirement to make a new film, addressing the human cost of their policies. ‘Hunger is being used as a weapon.'

Movement Against Antibiotic-Treated Meat

Emily Balsamo Euromonitor International
The movement against antibiotic use in meat and poultry in the United States is growing, with more and more producers pledging to forego the use of antibiotics in some capacity. As of 2016, it is estimated that only about 5-8% of meat is produced completely without the use of antibiotics, though the demand for and growth of the meat type is expected to dramatically change the landscape of the overall market.