“I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong… No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.” Full story »

I first met Langston Hughes in 1990. He’d been dead some twenty-three years by then, and I was a few months shy of my twenty-first birthday. We met almost by accident.

It was January, and the country’s eyes were on football. The NFL had moved Super Bowl XXVII from Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe, Arizona, to the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California because Arizona had failed to make Martin Luther King, Jr. Day an official holiday. To protest Arizona’s decision, and to show support for the new holiday—and, perhaps even to show solidarity with the NFL—someone on my college campus in northwestern Pennsylvania decided to celebrate with a rally. I can’t remember how, but I wound up on the program.

I read Hughes’ poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”:  Full story »

In 1995, only a year after South Africa’s first democratic election, I was working at a community centre in Nyanga, a shanty-town alongside Cape Town’s international airport. The centre had started a project which aimed to give HIV-positive single mothers a safe place to live and work.

My self-appointed task was to assist with setting up income generation projects. I had a “real” job during the week and would arrive early on Saturday mornings to a queue of toddlers and tiny children waiting to be picked up and swung. Little happy, snotty faces with upstretched arms taking their turns and then running to the back of the line to have another go.

And every one of them HIV-positive.

One day a child, late to be swung, came running too quickly and slipped. She fell hard on the concrete and scraped her arm and leg. Blood flowed and she began to howl. I stooped to pick her up and a nurse grabbed me, pulling me back.

“No,” she said, her face sad, “let her mother pick her up,” indicating the blood and cuts on my hands from where I’d injured myself working on my car.

That was the moment that the death sentence implied by AIDS hit home. None of these children would live more than another few years. Full story »

The sense of awakening in The Souls of Black Folk is impossible to miss. Published in 1903, when the new century itself was just awakening, Souls seemed to blink away the veil for a people looking for their own cultural and historical legacy. What W.E.B. Du Bois saw—and helped others see—was nothing short of amazing.

Perhaps it’s because I am now just awakening to Du Bois’ work that I see the book in such a light. Perhaps that awakening colors my view, giving me wide-eyed wonder to a text that’s over a century old. Perhaps my middle-class, middle-aged whiteness, and my historical place in the Twenty-First Century, makes Du Bois’ work seem exotic and wonderful.

Perhaps. Full story »

Oh, yeah. Oooh, ahhh, that’s how it always starts. Then later there’s running and screaming. – Dr. Ian Malcolm

Mary Shelley spent the summer of 1816 at the Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva, Switzerland with her husband, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and their close friend Lord Byron “watching the rain come down, while they all told each other ghost stories.” Thomas Pynchon says that by that December Mary Shelley was working on Chapter Four of her famous novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus.

It was the challenge of writing ghost stories to amuse each other that set Mary upon the idea of a different kind of horror story – one not based in the supernatural, but in science.

I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. Full story »

by Richard Allen Smith

Within two months of arriving in Afghanistan in 2007, I was sitting in the back of one of the few Humvees on Kandahar Air Field that wasn’t up-armored. Seven of my comrades and I, all paratroopers from Task Force One Fury, had rehearsed this mission over and over. This was one of the most important assignments we would have the entire deployment. We trained with the stern faces and stiff jaws of men who made their living as professional Soldiers. But as we sat in the dark in that back of that humvee, our mission commencing within minutes, the stern faces broke. The jaws quivered. Tears ran down all eight of our faces.

This mission wasn’t taking us outside the wire. We weren’t going more than a couple hundred yards, but we had precious cargo. Full story »

The great medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer created timeless characters in his Canterbury Tales; archetypal personalities such as the Wife of Bath and the Miller endure to this day. Through them Chaucer could readily celebrate, criticize and satirize different aspects of the society of his time. Additionally, Chaucer, as a public servant and man of the people, preserved a vernacular that may otherwise have been lost.

The late Richard Pryor, often hailed as the greatest comic to ever take the stage, is the American Chaucer. A master storyteller in the grand tradition of West African griots, fired by passion and pain, possessed of keen insight, he was also a brilliant impersonator with amazing range, an intuitive actor who never got his due, a social critic, a writer, a folklorist, a philosopher, and, most importantly, one funny motherfucker… Full story »

On February 16, the New York Times ran an article on the “Shy U.S. Intellectual” who “Created Playbook Used in a Revolution.” Author Sheryl Gay Stolberg reported:

Few Americans have heard of [political scientist Gene] Sharp. But for decades, his practical writings on nonviolent revolution — most notably “From Dictatorship to Democracy,” a 93-page guide to toppling autocrats . . . have inspired dissidents around the world.

According to a recent BBC article

. . . Sharp provides in his books a list of 198 “non-violent weapons,” ranging from the use of colours and symbols to mock funerals and boycotts. Full story »

The recent popular democratic movements in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa would have delighted the late Edward Said, although he would also be properly appalled by the most recent events in Bahrain and Libya. Long a critic of Western paternalism towards the Mideast, he would have been charmed by the fact that the Egyptian people basically overthrew a dictatorship without outside help, and largely non-violently to boot. Of course it’s not over yet, the army is still in charge, and who knows how this will play out. But it’s a vindication of one of the major preoccupations of Said’s intellectual and cultural career—the relationship between Western imperialism and its cultural legacy of hostility to non-Western cultures. That he was able combine this career as a political and cultural activist, particularly on behalf of Palestinian statehood, along with a distinguished teaching career at Columbia (one of his students was Barack Obama), and along with a distinguished career as a music critic, and the creation of one of the most remarkable symphony orchestras in history, is a testament to a remarkable intellect and a remarkable man. Full story »

“I would like to die peacefully with Thomas Tallis on my iPod before the disease takes me over and I hope that will not be for quite some time to come, because if I knew that I could die at any time I wanted, then suddenly every day would be as ­precious as a million pounds. If I knew that I could die, I would live. My life, my death, my choice.”

The words are Pratchett’s coming at the end of his Richard Dimbleby lecture, Shaking Hands With Death, and spoken, with tremendous compassion and composure, by his good friend Tony Robinson.

We arrive and leave life on our own. Full story »

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