David Oyelowo Fights for Representation in Family Films
The actor turned to directing after an eye-opening discussion with his son. He realized he couldn’t rely on Hollywood to find stories he wanted to tell.
David Oyelowo has taken a larger role behind the scenes to get projects made that reflect the complexities of people of color: “My job, I feel, is to normalize my existence,” he said.Credit.Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York Times
May 5, 2021, 10:00 a.m. ET
The actor David Oyelowo’s journey into the director’s chair took 20 years and one critical conversation with his oldest son.
Stacey Abrams Contains Multitudes
Her obsessions with public policy and pop culture came together in the new Supreme Court thriller “While Justice Sleeps,” the first time she has used her own name on one of her novels.
“One thing I am grateful to my parents for is that there was never a moment where they said, ‘Don’t do this,’” Stacey Abrams said. “What they wanted for us was to explore and try.”Credit.Diwang Valdez for The New York Times
May 5, 2021Updated 1:42 p.m. ET
Stacey Abrams published her first book “Rules of Engagement,” a romance novel about a brilliant undercover agent and her smoking-hot colleague while a student at Yale Law School. Eager to keep her worlds separate, she used the nom de plume Selena Montgomery, a homage to the “Bewitched” actress Elizabeth Montgomery.
How One Graphic Novel Looks at Anti-Asian Hate
In “Cyclopedia Exotica,” the artist and writer Aminder Dhaliwal created a fictitious community facing xenophobia, fetishization and media misrepresentation. It’s resonating with her thousands of Instagram followers.
“Cyclopedia Exotica,” out this month from Drawn & Quarterly, imagines a world in which cyclops are part of modern life.
In the new graphic novel “Cyclopedia Exotica,” immigrants with one eye coexist uneasily with their two-eyed neighbors.
Members of the cyclops community are targeted by curious online daters and porn addicts, as well as cosmetic surgeons eager to give them that desirable two-eyed look. They contend with xenophobes protesting mixed marriages, hateful comments from subway Karens and, in some cases, physical violence.
Isabel Díaz Ayuso, a conservative politician dubbed a “Trumpista” by her opponents, won the Madrid regional election by a landslide after she refused to shut down the capital’s bars and shops.
From Claire Rousay, Field Recordings for a Modern World
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/03/t-magazine/claire-rousay-music.html
With her new album, the emo ambient musician has learned to embrace everyday pleasures.
Claire Rousay, an experimental musician who turns found sounds into explorations of intimacy, at home in San Antonio.Credit.Liz Moskowitz
By Jenn Pelly
One spring evening, the San Antonio-based
experimental musician Claire Rousay was in the driver’s seat of her parked car, smoking cigarettes and sipping a well-concealed beverage, when she picked up the Zoom H5 field recorder that is never far from her reach. “I track my whole day every day,” Rousay says. “If I’m home, I’ll have a pair of stereo microphones in my living room, and a field recorder in my bedroom. I’ll probably have 18 hours of field recordings … I basically record my whole life.”