A Political and Literary Forum
The Sacred Black Masculine in My Life
Tyehimba Jess
Through online fan communities and digital platforms like TikTok, popular music is finding powerful new ways to shape everyday activism, protest, and resistance.
Byrd McDaniel
Robin D. G. Kelley talks with musician Vijay Iyer about systems of oppression, the responsibility of artists, and how jazz sells proximity to blackness to white people.
Robin D. G. Kelley, Vijay Iyer
Prosecutors use defendants’ rap lyrics to win cases despite the flimsiest evidence. Behind this rests a unique paranoia around hip hop and a long history of criminalizing black art.
Erik Nielson, Andrea L. Dennis
30 years after the Wall, the story of Berlin's anarchist utopia.
Paul Hockenos
Grammy winner David Ritz, who cowrote Marvin Gaye’s legendary “Sexual Healing,” recalls how the song emerged from Gaye’s struggles with faith, drug addiction, and childhood abuse.
David Ritz
‘Amazing Grace,’ the long-lost film of Franklin’s gospel album, offers a lesson in the deep connections between gospel and soul music.
Ed Pavlić
Kanye represents what happens when the liberties of artistic genius are confused for political insight.
Christopher Lebron
A personal essay on family, death, and the healing power of music.
Peter E. Gordon
What Afrofuturism can teach us about surviving Trump.
Mentorship is how the humanities justify themselves.
Jo Guldi
Overestimating the counterculture of the 1960s
Hal Stucker
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Robin D. G. Kelley
Michael Patrick Lynch
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Jedediah Britton-Purdy, Amy Kapczynski, David Singh Grewal
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