Difficult World News Today

Art is a line around your thoughts.

  Helen Hennessy Vendler was born in Boston in 1933. She studied chemistry at Emmanuel College, a Roman Catholic school for women in Boston, and went to the University of Louvain after graduation on a Fulbright fellowship. She took her Ph.D. at Harvard in 1960 with a dissertation on Yeats, a...

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Happy Monday, kittens! We've got the latest on prison death cults from Barrett Brown, Vint Cerf, who basically invented the internet, on the future of the internet, when good people put bad things on Facebook (Facebook hides them), your policing tax dollars at work (cooking meth, blowing up government property), a new twist on the…

One Human Family of the QCA will present “Happiness in a Difficult World,” a freesymposium featuring Dr. Diana Fritz Cates, professor of religion and ethics in the Department ofReligious Studies at the University of Iowa. She is also an author and editor as well as co-editor of the international “Journal of Religious Ethics.” According to […]

Adrienne Rich, in full Adrienne Cecile Rich, (born May 16, 1929, Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.—died March 27, 2012, Santa Cruz, California), American poet, scholar, teacher, and critic whose many volumes of poetry trace a stylistic transformation from formal, well-crafted but imitative poetry to a more personal and powerful style. Rich attended Radcliffe College (B.A., 1951), and before her graduation her poetry was chosen by W.H. Auden for publication in the Yale Younger Poets series. The result...

A respected Black airman writes about how his family encountered hate, and how it spurred him to battle racism.

Filmmaker Todd Chandler talks about his unusual, dreamlike approach in his PBS documentary Bulletproof, about the "normalization" of violence and mass shootings in America, and what he hopes audiences might take away from the film.

Critics tend to discount Rich’s later poems, fundamentally misunderstanding how they engage her radical vision of community.

Some books are a balm during difficult, uncertain times. Here are 13 of the year's best feel-good reads. Read on Boston.com.