Williamj Maxwell News Today

"I ask that NJCU’s mission not be further jeopardized due to poor leadership by the former administration, and regrettably by the apparently inattentive stewardship by its Board of Trustees," Carlos Hernandez, president of NJCU from 1993 to 2012, writes.

The books that show espionage agents are not the most subtle literary critics | The Economist reads

(RNS)— In 'The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover,' Stanford professor Lerone Martin details how the longtime FBI director shaped the belief in America as a Christian nation.

The historic period of the Harlem Renaissance hit its height a century ago, but its influence has impacted American culture through the decades.

Both Eddie S. Glaude's Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons For Our Own and Bill V. Mullen's James Baldwin: Living in Fire are organized around what Mullen calls the “arc of change, reflection, and evolution” in Baldwin's life story.

Darnell Martin, the director of I Like It Like That (1994), the first Hollywood studio vehicle piloted by a Black woman, recently said this of the withering of the previous Black film heyday of Do the Right Thing (1989) and Daughters of the Dust (1991): “It’s like they set us up to fail.” If the 21st-century FOIA film has its way, being set up to fail by shadowy forces will become a productive artistic subject — perhaps the primary inspiration, in fact, for backward-glancing Black ci...

With her spare line and sly, deadpan humor, Christine Sun Kim investigates sound as a physical and social phenomenon while also interrogating the cultural hierarchies in which sound operates. In her new mural for Washington University’s Kemper Art Museum, the artist and Deaf activist highlights how the weight of history and everyday experiences intertwine to affect the lives of Deaf people. February 4, 2021