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Kelsey Norris's ''House Gone Quiet'' and Justin C. Key's ''The World Wasn't Ready for You'' share an interest in the ways that being bound shapes our understanding of freedom. HOUSE [...]

"American Fiction" is a satirical film that follows the story of Thelonious "Monk" Ellison, a writer who decides to indulge the racism of the literary marketplace by writing a book filled with stereotypes under an assumed name. However, his prank backfires when editors love the book and offer big bucks to its fictitious author. The film explores the frustrations of Black creators and the commodification of Black art, but its critiques of Black representation are thin and vague. While the film is frequently funny, it fails to delve into the perspectives of the people who make or consume Black art, ultimately undermining its own appeal for richer Black expression. [Extracted from the article]

Though the narrator seems to finally recognize that her relationship with Francisco is unequal, Mills Newman doesn't explore the source of that dynamic, a choice that limits the weight of her narrator's revelations and percolating anxieties. But Francisco has no competition, nor does he really court the narrator: He just overwhelms her with his charm, his outsize personality slowly obscuring the narrator's own personal ambitions. BOOKS & the ARTS Alison mills newman's 1974 novel FRANCISCO begins and ends in a bed. The article comes up again as the narrator and Francisco head to a screening of his film. [Extracted from the article]

What the Buffalo livestream reveals about the limits of practical regulations in a country so enamored with firearms. In the minutes before an 18-year-old self-proclaimed white supremacist from Conklin, N.Y., [...]

THE MEMORY LIBRARIAN And Other Stories of Dirty Computer By Janelle Monáe Janelle Monáe's love of science fiction courses through her music like blood. The promotional artwork and music videos [...]

Pink Siifu reaches deep into tradition. 'Scurrrrd,' Pink Siifu, featuring Big Rube, Nick Hakim, Asal Hazel and Georgia Anne Muldrow (2021); 'Smile (Wit Yo Gold),' featuringV.C.R and CoCo O. (2021) [...]

STRANGE BEASTS OF CHINABy Yan GeTranslated by Jeremy Tiang The word ''cryptozoology'' has an aura of scientific rigor, evoking decoded gene sequences and immaculately preserved fossils. In practice, though, it's [...]

She created vivid new worlds to reveal truths about our own. Here's where to start with her books. Octavia Butler walked a singular path. A writer from her poverty-stricken childhood [...]

BOOKS & the ARTS OMELAS, THE UTOPIAN SETTING OF URSULA K. Ones Le is Who Guin's built Walk on 1973 deception. In N.K. Jemisin's version of this story, "The Ones Who Stay and Fight", the protesters do not leave, and instead of an abused child, the dark secret of Um-Helat (Jemisin's pastiche of Omelas) is an underground network of activists who plot to spread disinformation and bigotry. Both Le Guin's and Jemisin's stories are tales of radicalization, but Jemisin advances a more confrontational politics. Whether she's depicting real places like Birmingham, Ala., and New Orleans or imagined ones like Um-Helat and Castrima of her Broken Earth trilogy, Jemisin's cities, like the people she writes are layered and multiple. [Extracted from the article]

I told you that!" The chest-puffing often feeds into the philosophizing, as on "potentially the interlude", where Noname rebuffs loaded calls for her to make music more like Kendrick Lamar's - which is to say, music that's more palatable. FOR THE past five years, that question seemed to stump the Los Angeles - based rapper and prison abolitionist Noname. BOOKS & the ARTS CAN A CELEBRITY TRULY PRACTICE SOCIALISM?. [Extracted from the article]

REPRODUCTIONBy Ian Williams In his 2012 poem ''Rings,'' the Canadian writer Ian Williams turns a verse from Genesis, ''Give me children, or else I die,'' into a wry refrain. As [...]

Books & the Arts Race After Technology opens with a brief personal history set in the Crenshaw neighborhood of Los Angeles, where sociologist Ruha Benjamin spent a portion of her childhood. Instead of dismissing the makers of Beauty AI outright, Benjamin looks to the deep learning process that produced the algorithm, in which the software was set up to sort photos in accordance with labeled images tagged with information on face symmetry, wrinkles, skin color, and other factors. Soap dispensers are, of course, only one part of everyday life, and for farther-reaching systems, such as predictive policing software that assigns recidivism risk scores to parolees, Benjamin highlights how much their metrics rely on tainted data. These cases illustrate how expansive tech criticism can be when outcomes and effects are privileged over intentions, and Race After Technology is at its liveliest when Benjamin is zipping across milieus, connecting disparate technologies, movements, politics, and social systems. [Extracted from the article]

You expect, when you encounter a new ''theory,'' that it will make some facet of the world feel more lucid -- that the inexplicable will be explained. A good theory [...]

Though he's released just one movie - 2016's Split - as tactile and compelling as his cult classics The Sixth Sense (1999) and Unbreakable (2000), Shyamalan has continually proved to be a scrappy filmmaker capable of putting butts in seats, a virtue at a time when theater audiences are dwindling. IN THE OPENING MINUTES OF KNOCK AT THE CABIN, M. Night Shyamalan's latest movie, four strangers show up uninvited at a secluded Pennsylvania cabin occupied by two men and their adopted daughter. As much as Shyamalan tries to cloak Knock at the Cabin's central conflict in metaphysical horror and familial crisis, disbelief persists: The viewer is always aware that they are watching another trite and incurious M. Night Shyamalan film. [Extracted from the article]

In politics, enemies are easier to quarrel with than friends. An opponent disagreeing with you is business as usual. Dissent from someone you expected to be on your side can [...]

Midway through January, a White House immigration meeting made headlines for a choice vulgarity the president deployed to describe some foreign nations. Recounting the meeting to reporters, the Democratic senator [...]

Books & the Arts When accusing powerful men of sexual assault, women of color anticipate a higher burden of proof and a slimmer margin for error. In frank detail, the documentary recounts the multiple sexual assault and rape allegations against hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons and his accusers' struggles to go public. Drew Dixon, who once worked as an A&R executive at Simmons's famed Def Jam label, serves as the film's lodestar. [Extracted from the article]

The film isn't as pointed or distinctive as Peele's career highlight, Get Out, but it is decisively epic, trading the intricate thematic architecture of Peele's past movies for widescreen tableaux and outsize thrills. Before Nope centers the supernatural and spectacular, it focuses on the mundane: Otis Jr. (OJ) and Emerald are tanking the family business. BOOKS & the ARTS WHEN BLACK PEOPLE SAY "NO" OR ONE OF ITS VARIANTS IN response to some stressful or hazardous situation, we both affirm and negate the circumstances before us. [Extracted from the article]

In the article, the author discusses how a 18-year-old white supremacist livestreamed his shooting spree at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York showed the danger of racism, technology, and gun violence in the U.S. Topics include the efforts by government officials and legislators to find technical and legislative solutions to gun violence and the appeal by New York Governor Kathy Hochul to probe platforms like Twitch and Discord.

Anderson's signature creation is the Matrix game series, which in Resurrections is the actual Matrix films, scenes from which fill background screens and blip into the movie like hallucinations. Even if Warner Bros. were to zombify The Matrix the way it has Looney Tunes (whose characters, depressingly, appeared alongside Matrix characters in last year's Space Jam: A New Legacy), the series would always belong to viewers and other artists, too. Matrix co-creator Lana Wachowski directs the latest sequel without her sister Lilly, but the Wachowskis have long been critics of Hollywood's ingrained risk aversion. [Extracted from the article]

In focusing on O'Neal's betrayal, the film narrows the FBI's gross abuse of power into a character study. IN THE SUMMER OF 1967, FBI DIRECTOR J. EDGAR HOOVER issued the first in a series of memos outlining how the bureau would deal with what it deemed "black nationalist hate groups." The movie's climax, a nighttime police raid that leaves Hampton and another Panther dead, is just as controlled. [Extracted from the article]

COLUMNS AFTER HIS SLOW, DECADE-LONG ASCENT FROM LAID-OFF schoolteacher to buzzing indie star, Los Angeles rapper Open Mike Eagle suffered a series of setbacks. "Tattoos, haircuts, gold chains, anime/Tattoos, tattoos, tattoos, tattoos", he laments, knowing he can't simply buy a fresh start. Eagle's flights of fancy lead him back to his starting point as a divorced dad and indie rapper recovering from a rough year. [Extracted from the article]

On the cover of her debut album, Modus Vivendi, New Jersey rapper 070 Shake strikes a fascinating pose. Her breakout moment, a spotlight-stealing refrain on Kanye's song "Ghost Town", endeared her as a balladeer and a dramatist. The main architects are Dave Hamelin, a Canadian indie rocker, and Mike Dean, a mainstay in the G.O.O.D. Music producer corps, who mixed every song on the album. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses a few hits music albums including, Gender Bender, with titles Cisgender and Eddie Vedder, Earthling.