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Film Review 'A Borrowed Identity' Shows Life in Israel from an Arab's View

Marcia Garcia Film Journal International
Directed by the popular Israeli filmmaker Eran Riklis and written by Arab-Israeli journalist Sayed Kashua, 'A Borrowed Idenity' chronicles a young Arab-Israeli man’s painful coming of age--detailing Israel’s treatment of its Arab citizens. At its best, 'A Borrowed Identity' concerns itself with the malleability of self, with who we are and how society and culture can force identity choices on us.

Nutrition Gets Personal

Clare Leschin-Hoar Future Food 2050
Dietary guidance that’s targeted to your precise genetic makeup is the wave of the future, says nutrition scientist Jeffrey Blumberg.

Thirty-Two in a Different Country; Invented Mothers

Zeina Hashem Beck Heart Journal Online
A Lebanese poet from Dubai, Zeina Hashem Beck offers two poems, Thirty-Two and in a Different Country and The Invented Mothers, both touching the deep trauma of warfare on civilians.

Where's the Outrage?

Rich Yeselson Dissent Magazine
The book under review examines the rise of American capitalism, the visionary attempts by workers to resist and the housebreaking of a long-running anti-capitalist ethos from imaginative, frenzied opposition to diffuse, angry, but ultimate accommodation. While a residual 19th century fight-back culture built the CIO and defended the New Deal into the 1960s, it lacked the same emancipatory charge it had earlier, and unions shifted to cautious monitors of the working class

Between the World and Me

Josie Duffy Rewire
Ta Nehisi Coates is best known for his June, 2014 article in the Atlantic, "The Case for Reparations." Since then, he has emerged as one of today's most important commentators on racism and anti-racism. His new book has garnered both praise and push-back, placing it right at the center of our contemporary debates on the subject. Here, Josie Duffy calls it "an important book—perhaps the most important in a generation—on how race in this country functions."

Rectify Is Still Television’s Quiet Triumph

David Sims The Atlantic
SundanceTV’s Southern Gothic drama is entering its third season of critical acclaim and low ratings, but its against-the-odds existence bodes well for the industry.

Outings, Stigmata

Francesca Bell Pank Magazine
The Marin County poet Francesca Bell approaches the abuse of children from their own perspective, as sacrilege, based on published testimonies.

Bigotry 101: Why Haters Gonna Hate

Michael Hirsch The Indypendent
Here is bigotry as a systematic, total mindset having a special affinity for right-wing movements. The author explores its appeal, the self-image it justifies, the interests it serves and its complex connection not so much to antiquity as modernity, shaping the conspiratorial and paranoid worldview of true believers, elitists and chauvinists. It enables their hiding behind mainstream conservative motifs to support policies disadvantaging the targets of their contempt.

Man of the World

Annette Gordon-Reed American Scholar
As Annette Gordon-Reed notes in this review, John Quincy Adams is probably best known through Steven Spielberg's portrayal of him, in the film Amistad, where he defends enslaved people who revolted aboard a slave ship. He was also a President of the United States and the son of a President. As we consider an election contest that might be one between two "dynastic" seekers of the office, this biography offers a look back at the first "dynastic" presidency.