Friday, November 23, 2018
A Clueless Clown
An excerpt from the Washington Post -
Trump is not a champion of human rights. He is a clueless clown.
By Eugene Robinson
In Riyadh, they must be laughing at President Trump. In Pyongyang, too, and in Tehran. In Beijing and, of course, in Moscow, they must be laughing until it hurts. They look at Washington and they don’t see a champion of freedom and human rights. They see a preening, clueless clown.
Trump’s reaction — or non-reaction — to the Saudi regime’s brutal killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi is a holiday-season gift to autocrats around the globe. It shows them that if you just shower Trump with over-the-top flattery, feed him some geopolitical mumbo jumbo and make vague promises to perhaps buy some American-made goods in the future, he will literally let you get away with murder.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-is-not-a-champion-of-human-rights-he-is-a-clueless-clown/2018/11/22/979a1342-edd7-11e8-8679-934a2b33be52_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.b8d4ef2aef5a
Trump is not a champion of human rights. He is a clueless clown.
By Eugene Robinson
In Riyadh, they must be laughing at President Trump. In Pyongyang, too, and in Tehran. In Beijing and, of course, in Moscow, they must be laughing until it hurts. They look at Washington and they don’t see a champion of freedom and human rights. They see a preening, clueless clown.
Trump’s reaction — or non-reaction — to the Saudi regime’s brutal killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi is a holiday-season gift to autocrats around the globe. It shows them that if you just shower Trump with over-the-top flattery, feed him some geopolitical mumbo jumbo and make vague promises to perhaps buy some American-made goods in the future, he will literally let you get away with murder.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-is-not-a-champion-of-human-rights-he-is-a-clueless-clown/2018/11/22/979a1342-edd7-11e8-8679-934a2b33be52_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.b8d4ef2aef5a
Thursday, November 22, 2018
Powerful
An excerpt from the Atlantic -
Letters: ‘I Want to Grow Up to Be Someone That Fights for Families Like Yours’
Teenagers in California respond to the story of a mother and son separated at the border.
‘The Separation Was So Long. My Son Has Changed So Much.’
In September, Jeremy Raff reported on the story of Anita and Jenri, a mother and her six-year-old son. Anita and Jenri fled Honduras and crossed the Rio Grande on a raft near McAllen, Texas, in mid-June; they immediately turned themselves over to Border Patrol and asked for asylum. In accordance with Trump administration policy, agents separated Anita and Jenri; they were detained 25 miles apart from one another for a month before a lawyer helped them reunite.
Christsna Sot, an eighth grade teacher at Impact Academy of Arts in Hayward, California, showed Raff’s video to his students, who wrote letters to Anita and Jenri. Here is a selection of those letters.
https://www.theatlantic.com/letters/archive/2018/11/eighth-graders-respond-story-family-separation/574024/
Letters: ‘I Want to Grow Up to Be Someone That Fights for Families Like Yours’
Teenagers in California respond to the story of a mother and son separated at the border.
‘The Separation Was So Long. My Son Has Changed So Much.’
In September, Jeremy Raff reported on the story of Anita and Jenri, a mother and her six-year-old son. Anita and Jenri fled Honduras and crossed the Rio Grande on a raft near McAllen, Texas, in mid-June; they immediately turned themselves over to Border Patrol and asked for asylum. In accordance with Trump administration policy, agents separated Anita and Jenri; they were detained 25 miles apart from one another for a month before a lawyer helped them reunite.
Christsna Sot, an eighth grade teacher at Impact Academy of Arts in Hayward, California, showed Raff’s video to his students, who wrote letters to Anita and Jenri. Here is a selection of those letters.
https://www.theatlantic.com/letters/archive/2018/11/eighth-graders-respond-story-family-separation/574024/
A Quiet Impact
An excerpt from the New York Times -
How a $15,000 Movie Rallied a New Generation of Black Auteurs
By Reggie Ugwu
It’s not so hard to find them now. But nearly 10 years ago, when they appeared in “Medicine for Melancholy,” the first film by the “Moonlight” director Barry Jenkins, characters like Micah and Jo’ — young, black, financially overdrawn but rolling in polished pop culture references — were, if not exactly unicorns, a protected species, rare enough to be worthy of tapping the person next to you and spreading the word.
Aimless and anxious 20-somethings in popular culture were nothing new, of course. But they tended to be monochromatic, as if early-onset ennui and the shallow comforts of art snobbery were the exclusive inventions of white people.
So cinephiles at the time took note when, seemingly out of nowhere, came a convincing counternarrative in the form of “Medicine.” It followed Micah and Jo’, a would-be couple whose one-night stand stretched fitfully into two, as they walked and biked around an artfully desaturated San Francisco, waxing on about indie rock and Barbara Loden in one breath, and black identity, the politics of interracial relationships and gentrification in the next.
~~~~~~~~~~
With Jenkins’s third film, “If Beale Street Could Talk,” due next month, the people who made “Medicine” as well as prominent admirers — including Lena Waithe (“Master of None,” “The Chi”), Justin Simien (“Dear White People”) and Terence Nance (“Random Acts of Flyness”) — discussed its outsize legacy and quiet influence.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/21/movies/medicine-for-melancholy-black-auteurs.html
How a $15,000 Movie Rallied a New Generation of Black Auteurs
By Reggie Ugwu
It’s not so hard to find them now. But nearly 10 years ago, when they appeared in “Medicine for Melancholy,” the first film by the “Moonlight” director Barry Jenkins, characters like Micah and Jo’ — young, black, financially overdrawn but rolling in polished pop culture references — were, if not exactly unicorns, a protected species, rare enough to be worthy of tapping the person next to you and spreading the word.
Aimless and anxious 20-somethings in popular culture were nothing new, of course. But they tended to be monochromatic, as if early-onset ennui and the shallow comforts of art snobbery were the exclusive inventions of white people.
So cinephiles at the time took note when, seemingly out of nowhere, came a convincing counternarrative in the form of “Medicine.” It followed Micah and Jo’, a would-be couple whose one-night stand stretched fitfully into two, as they walked and biked around an artfully desaturated San Francisco, waxing on about indie rock and Barbara Loden in one breath, and black identity, the politics of interracial relationships and gentrification in the next.
~~~~~~~~~~
With Jenkins’s third film, “If Beale Street Could Talk,” due next month, the people who made “Medicine” as well as prominent admirers — including Lena Waithe (“Master of None,” “The Chi”), Justin Simien (“Dear White People”) and Terence Nance (“Random Acts of Flyness”) — discussed its outsize legacy and quiet influence.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/21/movies/medicine-for-melancholy-black-auteurs.html
Wednesday, November 21, 2018
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