Once
Chicago poet Donna Pucciani depicts Ukraine’s struggle through the colors of its flag and the grief of domestic details.
food
Let’s Call It Assimilation Food
Taste
When immigrants adapt to their new surroundings, the most immediate way this happens is through the food they make: They look around at what’s available and try to make it into something they can recognize.
tv
What the Kids in the Hall Taught Me About Feminism
Slate
These five men in drag weren’t just one of the best ’90s comedy groups, but one of the most enlightened.
books
Olga Dies Dreaming
Facebook
It’s a surreal experience to read a work of fiction that literally takes everything happening in my neighborhood and turns it into a sweeping epic about Zapatista-inspired guerrilla movements fighting for Puerto Rican liberation
books
Radical Justice
Chicago Review of Books
This 2022 Pulitzer Prize winner in history is a tale of crime, racism, power, and the conflict between punitive and restorative justice in settler-colonial North America.
film
Northman Is an Honorable Failure
Jacobin
The Northman is about a glowering, muscle-bound man-mountain named Prince Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård, son of Stellan) who as a boy witnesses the killing of his father, King Aurvandill (Ethan Hawke), and the abduction of his mother, Queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman), by the king’s betraying half-bastard brother Fjölnir (Claes Bang). Amleth vows revenge.
food
Pimento-Cracy
Oxfam America
Pimento cheese’s history is one of migration and a food’s class-switching. The hankering for an exclusive ingredient created a new labor market and a broader appetite.
tv
A New Wave of Shows Cares About a Group of Women the Rest of TV Has Ignored
Slate
Sure, their characters are privileged, but they’re also dealing with unsteady marriages, ambition, and family.
books
One Woman’s Spanish Civil War
The Indypendent
Judith Berlowitz’s historical novel offers readers a peek into the Spanish Civil War and the idealism that brought people from across the globe together to fight for democratic governance and human rights.
books
Five Critics Who Changed the Way We Read
The Guardian
How modern literary criticism came to be – with a little help from TS Eliot, FR Leavis, Raymond Williams and others.
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