Phyllis Bennis, Richard Falk: Americans must demand a credible investigation into Shireen Abu Akleh’s killing
If our tax dollars are furnishing the weapons that kill journalists and other innocents, that’s not just an international crime — it’s against U.S. law, too.
Derrick Z. Jackson: Roe v. Wade Draft Bodes Ill for Air, Wetlands and EPA
If Alito’s draft remains the foundation of the court’s final ruling, then he is also likely prepared to let white-run industry off the hook for fouling the land, air, rivers, and lakes, poisoning communities, which today are disproportionately of color.
Richard Deming: Struth’s unpeopled photos evoke the loneliness of urban life
Sixth Avenue at 50th Street (1978) by Thomas Struth I’m making my way across lower Manhattan on an early May afternoon, my mask snug and my glasses quickly fogging … Continue reading
Video: Elif Shafak | The Politics of Fiction
Listening to stories widens the imagination; telling them lets us leap over cultural walls, embrace different experiences, feel what others feel. Elif Shafak builds on this simple idea to argue that fiction can overcome identity politics.
Video: How insects become airborne, slowed down to a speed the human eye can appreciate
Guided by the biologist Adrian Smith, the film captures a series of 11 different winged insects – including a praying mantis, beetles and weevils – as they propel into flight at a riveting 3,200 frames per second, and are slowed down roughly 200 times for your viewing pleasure.
Piedad Bonnett: Two Poems (with translations)
Someone is telling us an old tale —
someone is sobbing and praying
to be given a pair of wings.
Erica Etelson: In order to transcend Trumpism, we must tend to suffering — not celebrate it
Our survival as a species depends on our ability to turn away from the delusion of sweet revenge, and show compassion for those we may dislike or detest.
Stephen Dobyns: Can Poetry Matter?
Heart feels the time has come to compose lyric poetry.
No more storytelling for him. Oh, Moon, Heart writes,
sad wafer of the heart’s distress. And then: Oh, Moon,
bright cracker of the heart’s pleasure.
Abby Zimet: Concerned Collins Calls Cops On Constituents Committing Communist Chalk Crimes
Susan ‘Snowflake’ Collins was so troubled by chalk-wielding desperados who hate-crimed the (public) sidewalk outside her house by (politely) asking she protect the rights of those women that she called the cops on them – this, while her party of neo-fascists and Christian zealots works tirelessly to drag us all back to the 1300s…
Nina Kossman: Valley of Closed Eyes
Dipping my cheekbones
into the blind substance,
into the cooling water of the maternal yes
Jon Queally: Buffalo Gunman’s Racism Directly Tied to Mainstreaming of White Nationalism
White nationalism is the greatest threat to our nation’s security and we must hold everyone who spreads this hate accountable before anyone else is harmed.
Enheduanna: Seven Sumerian Temple Hymns (2300 BCE)
The temple seems to listen as she describes its resident: “your lady a water bird — sacred woman of the inner chamber,” she says to the temple in the intimate conversation that characterizes each hymn.
Video: Philip Levine reads Federico García Lorca (text included)
Philip Levine reads Federico García Lorca’s “New York (Office and Denunciation)”
Baron Wormser: A Poetry Proposal
There is no shortage of poems and no shortage of strategies to deliver the poems. The failing lies in our wariness. It’s true: to embrace poetry is to embrace a degree of uncertainty. Yet what else is life?
Vox Populi 