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Bread and Circuses

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The Two Daves
March 24, 2017
Critics and comedy fans laud Dave Chappelle for his analysis of American race and social relations, yet his finest skill might be the way he manipulates time on the stand-up stage. You see it first in obvious ways—as, for example, in the contrast between his deliberate joke ...

The Horror of North America
February 24, 2017
Jordan Peele’s Get Out, which premieres nationwide this Friday, is one of the few black horror films not about Africa to feature both possessed black people and the deep wilderness. This cinematic tradition can be traced back to the early twentieth century. In 1940’s ...

The Defiant I Am Not Your Negro
February 10, 2017
The film’s promotional poster notably features just Baldwin’s eyes and the title, and all through the film are magnetic images of black people staring, looking off, caught in their own subjectivity. The effect of these eyes turned back on the viewer is breathtaking. What ...

Make American Dystopias Great Again
January 27, 2017
It was a bright cold day in January, and the blogosphere was awash in the world of 1984. After senior Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway took to the airwaves to declare that her White House colleagues operated in a world of “alternative facts” it only seemed logical—and ...

Obama Out
January 13, 2017
This week, the country’s dominant mode of pop-cultural expression was the public speech—something of a throwback trend, given Americans’ patterns of media consumption nowadays. In the smartphone era, we tend not to gather around and listen to our leaders ...