And – perhaps ironically! – the book is titled after a viral blog post from 2014 by author Reni Eddo-Lodge: “Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race.” The prize is for, in Britain’s terms, a BAME writer – Black, Asian, or minority ethnic. The judges said it was “a thunderclap of a book” and that it “unflinchingly confronts a country where racism is – by all indicators – at an all-time high, but there are no identifiable racists.”
Blog
As London’s Rents Keep Rising, Warnings That The City Will Lose Its Artists And Its ‘Creative Crown’
Yikes: “Anna Harding, the chief executive of Space studios, which provides premises for nearly 800 artists including three Turner prize winners, blamed rising property prices and shrinking studios for dramatically squeezing the time and space available for creative activity. Artists now face a choice between working full time to pay the rent and fitting in a few hours in their studios at weekends, or giving up entirely.”
Female Directors Are Finally Starting To Get Traction In Sci-Fi
Katherine Bigelow made Strange Days ($42 million budget) more than 20 years ago. Excepting the Wachowski siblings’ Cloud Atlas and Jupiter Ascending (they got their Hollywood cred from the Matrix series, which they made when they were male), it took until Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman and Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time for Hollywood to let a woman helm a big-budget science-fiction feature. (Another one, Claire Denis’s High Life, is on the way.) Anne Billson looks at the trouble female filmmakers have had making headway in high-end science fiction – and at the numerous interesting efforts they’ve made on low budgets.
A Longtime Cirque Du Soleil Performer Fell And Died During A Performance In Florida
“While he was performing an aerial straps number, long-time aerialist Yann Arnaud fell onto the stage, a Cirque du Soleil representative said in a statement. He was taken to Tampa General Hospital, where he died from his injuries.”
Bomb Threat Cancels A Concert In Austin, At SXSW
Austin, which has been struck by a series of handmade bombs in the last few weeks, is on edge, so when the promotion company Live Nation said it had gotten an emailed bomb threat, the police took it seriously. They “scoured the area around the Fair Market venue, where a ‘Bud Light x The Roots & Friends Jam’ showcase was scheduled for that evening, and found no threat. But Bud Light opted to cancel the event.” A suspect for the threat (but not for the other bombs) was later arrested.
The Historical Information About Racism, Anti-Catholicism, And Much More Encoded In Old Folk Songs
Oh: “‘Southern folk music’s overwhelming dominance — for all its championing by non-Southern liberals — also subtly reinforces the ‘heritage not hate’ defenses of the Confederate flag and other antebellum and pre–civil rights nostalgia,’ Josh Garrett-Davis, the Gamble assistant curator at the Autry Museum of the American West, wrote recently. This cultural rebranding began after the North withdrew its troops, and the South, in destroying the apparatus of Northern occupation, played down slavery, and played up history and states’ rights.”
Can Writers Who Wrote Beautifully While Drunk And Who Stop Drinking Still Write Well?
Ask David Foster Wallace – or Leslie Jamison: “I’d been afraid that meetings were basically lobotomies served alongside coffee-flavored water and Chips Ahoy!; afraid that even if sobriety could offer stability and sincerity and maybe even salvation, it could never be a story. But Infinite Jest knew better. It wasn’t that the novel’s brilliance survived the deadening force of sobriety. Its brilliance depended on what sobriety had wrought.”
Community Theatre Putting On Play ‘With Holocaust Themes’ Gets Hate Calls
Since the new play opened last weekend, the Footlights Theatre in Falmouth, Maine, has been getting hate calls. “I had one woman tell me, ‘I don’t want to see a play about those (expletive) Jews,” the executive artistic director says. He sent an email out to supporters: “I need people to know this is happening. … It’s not an open invitation to hate again.”
A New Opera Confronts The My Lai Massacre, And Its Long Shadow
It’s been 50 years since the massacre, and since Hugh Thompson and his helicopter crew stopped it from being far worse. Now, as the opera plays around the country, traditional Vietnamese instrument expert Van-Anh Vanessa Vo explains why it’s so important. “As a child in Hanoi, Vietnam, Vo learned about the My Lai Massacre in school and uses instruments made out of old artillery shells in the opera, which she described as a memorial to the murdered civilians as well as Thompson and his crew.”
Emily Nasrallah, ‘Icon Of Literature And Lebanese Creativity,’ Has Died At 86
Nasrallah was a journalist, teacher, lecturer and novelist who advocated for women’s rights and wrote about refugees and war in Lebanon. Her books “recount the emptiness left by immigration, the women left behind by men seeking a better life beyond war-torn Lebanon, the parents abandoned by children desperate to fulfill the dreams they had been denied.”