Upon Voiding Pills
New Verse News
Lavinia Kumar’s poetry protests the government’s repression of safe medical abortion.
poetry
Simply Breathing
Killing George Floyd
Three years after the murder of George Floyd on March 25 2020, San Francisco poet Beau Beausoleil offers a limited portfolio of 20 poems as homage and legacy. (More will follow in June.)
books
Vietnam Changed the Way This Jazz Man Heard the World
The New York Times
Henry Threadgill’s memoir unfolds from his maddening wartime experience to his boundary-pushing musical career.
film
‘Plan 75’ Review: Haunting Japanese Heartbreaker Imagines a Dystopia That Could Start Any Day Now
IndieWire
Chie Hayakawa's raw and sobering debut imagines a near-future Japan in which the elderly are encouraged to volunteer for euthanization. The scariest thing about Hayakawa’s film isn’t its familiar depiction of a society that privileges human output over human dignity, but rather its soft dystopian sketch of a society that’s able to soft-shoe around dehumanization and/or sell it as an act of grace.
food
For US Maple Syrup Producers, Climate Change and Competition Threaten a Way of Life
Modern Farmer
Very little about the process of harvesting maple syrup on Maple Breeze Farm has changed in the last four centuries, but this season the Halls are facing unprecedented challenges as a result of global changes in weather patterns and the marketplace.
tv
White House Plumbers Is a Hilarious Take on the Watergate Break-In
Jacobin
In the new series White House Plumbers, a brilliant send-up of the Watergate scandal, Woody Harrelson and Justin Theroux star as Richard Nixon’s bumbling covert operators. It's approaching a Coen brothers level of satiric genius.
books
Revisiting the Great Migration and the Black Literary Legends It Inspired
The Indypendent
Chi Boy is part memoir, part social history, part eulogy for his ancestors, and part tribute to men whose literary output continues to inspire him.
film
‘Chile ’76’ Review: Domestic Unease That Twists Into Intrigue
The New York Times
Manuela Martelli’s new film examines the Pinochet dictatorship through the eyes of a woman who never intended to play an active role.
food
The Sweet History of Lemonade
Atlas Obscura
Lemonade became an emblem of the temperance movement. Lucy Webb Hayes, First Lady from 1877 to 1881, bore the nickname “Lemonade Lucy” for her refusal to serve alcohol in the White House.
tv
The Real History of Queen Charlotte, and the Problem With Netflix’s Bridgerton Spinoff
Vox
Shonda Rhimes’s new show imagines an interracial romance that remakes Regency England. That sure didn’t happen.
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