Marvel’s Cloak & Dagger is the story of Tandy Bowen (Olivia Holt) and Tyrone Johnson (Aubrey Joseph) – two teenagers from very different backgrounds, who find themselves burdened and awakened to newly acquired superpowers which are mysteriously linked to one another.
Marvel’s “Cloak & Dagger” will premiere on Thursday, June 7
The Serpent’s Secret (Kiranmala and the Kingdom Beyond #1) (2018)
On the morning of her twelfth birthday, Kiranmala is just a regular sixth grader living in Parsippany, New Jersey … until her parents mysteriously vanish and a drooling rakkhosh demon slams through her kitchen, determined to eat her alive. Turns out there might be some truth to her parents’ fantastical stories-like how Kiranmala is a real Indian princess and how she comes from a secret place not of this world.
To complicate matters, two crush-worthy princes ring her doorbell, insisting they’ve come to rescue her. Suddenly, Kiran is swept into another dimension full of magic, winged horses, moving maps, and annoying, talking birds. There she must solve riddles and battle demons all while avoiding the Serpent King of the underworld and the Rakkhoshi Queen in order to find her parents and basically save New Jersey, her entire world, and everything beyond it .
Sayantani DasGupta grew up hearing stories about brave princesses, bloodthirsty rakkhosh and flying pakkhiraj horses. She is a pediatrician by training, but now teaches at Columbia University. When she’s not writing or reading, Sayantani spends time watching cooking shows with her trilingual children and protecting her black Labrador Retriever Khushi from the many things that scare him, including plastic bags. She is a team member of We Need Diverse books, and can be found online at www.sayantanidasgupta.com and on Twitter at @sayantani16.
Estonia’s system links locally held data vs. creating giant, federal data library
“Data aren’t centrally held, thus reducing the chance of Equifax-level
breaches. Instead, the government’s data platform, X-Road, links
individual servers through end-to-end encrypted pathways, letting
information live locally. Your dentist’s practice holds its own data; so
does your high school and your bank. When a user requests a piece of
information, it is delivered like a boat crossing a canal via locks.“
Where No Black Woman Has Gone Before: Subversive Portrayals in Speculative Film and TV
(2018)
When Lieutenant Uhura took her place on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise on Star Trek, the actress Nichelle Nichols went where no African American woman had ever gone before. Yet several decades passed before many other black women began playing significant roles in speculative (i.e., science fiction, fantasy, and horror) film and television—a troubling omission, given that these genres offer significant opportunities for reinventing social constructs such as race, gender, and class. Challenging cinema’s history of stereotyping or erasing black women on-screen, Where No Black Woman Has Gone Before showcases twenty-first-century examples that portray them as central figures of action and agency.
Writing for fans as well as scholars, Diana Adesola Mafe looks at representations of black womanhood and girlhood in American and British speculative film and television, including 28 Days Later, AVP: Alien vs. Predator, Children of Men, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Firefly, and Doctor Who: Series 3. Each of these has a subversive black female character in its main cast, and Mafe draws on critical race, postcolonial, and gender theories to explore each film and show, placing the black female characters at the center of the analysis and demonstrating their agency.
Diana Adesola Mafe is an associate professor of English at Denison University, where she teaches courses in postcolonial, gender, and black studies. She has a PhD in English from McMaster University, an MA in English from the University of Guelph, and a BA in English and Art from McMaster University. Her work tracks the literary and cinematic roles of and for women of color in African and American discourses, with a current emphasis on speculative fiction and video games.
During a recent tour of the Archives for our A.R.T. program, I came across a memo that I found so prescient I couldn’t help but share what transpired in June of 1971. On the opening night ofPride and Prejudice: A Woman’s Exhibition a group of women conducted a three hour sit-in to protest what they saw as an exclusionary and misleading exhibition. Curated by Jo Miller, the idea for the exhibition came from “foot-in-mouth” quotes by men about women while also trying to address the “the more militant credo” of the Women’s Liberation movement. Miller included quotes by ‘great’ men that demeaned women in order to present “the many provocative and provoked faces of woman as she has been seen, both with pride and with prejudice.” The protestors wrote over didactics to “underline the unjust and condescending views of women’s enemies.”
On opening day, June 7, 1971, four Brooklyn Museum staff members met with four representatives from the Women’s Liberation movement groups (as shown in the above memo). They discussed their grievances: 91% of the artists in the show are male; there should have been at least 50% women artists; and “the fact that no black women are in the show.” They were “demanding not only a show exclusively for women artists in the Museum, but one for black women artists.” That demand is why I thought this memo sent by Museum staff to the Director was so poignant. It took us nearly 50 years to have such an exhibition; We Wanted a Revolutiontook place just last year and is still touring.
Perusing the Archives and conducting research always gives me the opportunity to reflect on how far we have come and how far we still need to go. This memo also brought to mind Howardena Pindell’s report “Art (World) & Racism: Testimony, Documentation and Statistics” that is featured in our publication We Wanted a Revolution Black Radical Women 1965-1985 Sourcebook and our 2015/2016 exhibition Agitprop!
The thing about prices is they tend to change. But for 70 years, between 1886 and the late 1950s, the price of a Coca-Cola was a shiny nickel.
Think about how crazy that is: Between 1886 and the late ‘50s, you had two world wars, Prohibition and the Great Depression. But through it all, one constant in life was the nickel Coke.
This is the story of how two lawyers from Chattanooga struck a deal with the president of Coca-Cola that led to the company’s pricing lockdown. With re-enactments from our very own Robert Smith & Nick Fountain, it’s the fourth episode of Planet Money Shorts.
Fahrenheit 451 is based on Ray Bradbury’s classic novel. In a future where the media is an opiate, history is rewritten and “firemen” burn books, Jordan plays Guy Montag, a young fireman who struggles with his role as law enforcer and with his “mentor”, played by Michael Shannon.
Five Fingers for Marseilles (2017) Dir by Michael Matthews
Twenty years ago, the young ‘Five Fingers’ fought for the rural town of Marseilles, against brutal police oppression. Now, after fleeing in disgrace, Tau returns, seeking peace. Finding the town under new threat, he must reluctantly fight to free it. Will the Five Fingers stand again?
‘Five Fingers for Marseilles’ fuses western influences, from classic to spaghetti and revisionist eras, into a contemporary South African drama played in local tongue by four generations of acclaimed South African stars. The great westerns always contained socio-political threads, and Five Fingers’ loose allegory on today’s South Africa is edge-of-the-seat, and starkly human.
Starring: Vuyo Dabula, Hamilton Dhlamini, Zethu Dlomo, Kenneth Nkosi, Mduduzi Mabaso, Aubrey Poolo, Lizwi Vilakazi, Warren Masemola, Dean Fourie, Anthony Oseyemi, Brendon Daniels and Jerry Mofokeng.
Estonia’s high-tech government eliminates most paperwork: Voting, taxes, healthcare
“It was during Kotka’s tenure that the e-Estonian goal reached its
fruition. Today, citizens can vote from their laptops and challenge
parking tickets from home. They do so through the ‘once only’ policy,
which dictates that no single piece of information should be entered
twice. Instead of having to “prepare” a loan application, applicants
have their data—income, debt, savings—pulled from elsewhere in the
system. There’s nothing to fill out in doctors’ waiting rooms, because
physicians can access their patients’ medical histories. Estonia’s
system is keyed to a chip-I.D. card that reduces typically onerous,
integrative processes—such as doing taxes—to quick work.”
