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The Perfect Pivot

Willa Paskin Slate
In its second season, Halt tells the story of two women laboring to bring a new, better technology to consumers with an assist from a houseful of gamers. Lean In, Gamergate, and the ongoing under-representation of women in tech hang heavy over the episodes.

What’s Up?

Margaret Rozga Verse Wisconsin Online
In a world of multiple crises and bad politics, Wisconsin poet Margaret Rozga celebrates the spirit of unyielding global resistance.

How Long Have We Really Been `One Nation Under God'?

Molly Worthen The Nation, June 8, 2015 edition
With its numerous religious awakenings and repeated instances of religiosity as political theater, it's easy to forget US civic life is secular. Author Kevin Kruse argues that the effort to ground political rights in spiritual authority and not in democratic discussion and decision-making originated with a coterie of corporate heads, right-wing politicians, reactionary pastors and cultural icons as a bulwark against progressive politics and New Deal legislation.

Cold War Modernist

John H. Brown American Diplomacy
Scholars are producing increasingly detailed accounts of how the U.S. government utilized artists and culture in the Cold War anti-Communist crusade. According to former diplomat John H. Brown, this new study, by Greg Barnhisel, shows that an important factor in making modernism work for U.S. Cold War interests involved "defanging modernism of its radicalism and turning it into an international vehicle for whitebread all-American convictions."

Food Across the Curriculum

Restaurant Hospitality editors Restaurant Hospitality
Liberal arts courses across the curriculum include food as a central topic of academic study

Telegenic

Erica Goss New Verse News
California poet Erica Goss raises the question, knowing the reader will have an answer: Is one child's life worth more than another's?

Native American Artists of the Plains: A Tale of Woe and Glory

Thomas Powers The New York Review of Books
The compendious catalogue of a recent exhibit offers representations of art as practiced by numerous Plains tribes from first encounter with Europeans to their near decimation not only from military conquest and rough frontier justice but from European-spawned disease. Much of the work is likened to that of Italian painters of religious scenes during the Renaissance, which might be defined as the depiction of social life sustained by a sacred sacrifice of blood.

Hijacking Public Housing

Rhonda Y. Williams Southern Spaces
The history of public housing in the United States can be read, in part, as a history of the modern impoverishment of racial minorities, in particular, of the African American population. As reviewer Rhonda Y. Williams notes, Edward G. Goetz has written a "multi-layered analysis of housing policy and redevelopment," in a book that "explicitly examines black removal from urban spaces and the perpetuation of racialized poverty."

‘Forbidden Films’ Exhumes Nazi Poison From the Movie Vaults

J. Hoberman New York Times
The Third Reich produced 1,200 films, 300 of which were banned after WWII as dangerous propaganda. Forbidden Films examines the 40 that remain effectively banned to this day, locked inside a German federal film archive and only made availavle to researchers. Are they historical evidence, incitements to murder, fascist pornography, evergreen entertainments, toxic waste or passé kitsch? Are these films better shown and discussed rather than repressed and forgotten?