Since the inception of hip-hop culture, the DJ has been its cornerstone. The culture’s starting point is widely accepted as the birthday party Kool DJ Herc threw for his sister at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, The Bronx on August 11, 1973. Kool Herc’s selection spanned the funk genre, and using two copies of the same record,...
By the late 1950s foremost musicians like Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus and John Coltrane explicitly introduced politics in their jazz, as the civil rights movement started gaining momentum in the US. Musician and author Gilad Atzmon explained it in a 2005 essay: Black Americans were calling for freedom, and jazz expressed it better than mere...
In September 2010, we commissioned Italian photographer Giacomo Cosua for a series on Fall in Milan, Rome, and Venice.
My home subway station is Kings Highway on the Brighton line, in southern Brooklyn, and served by the B and Q trains. The station has three entrances and typically when I enter or exit, I rush in or out. Sometimes I slow down and look at something on the station walls. I am quite familiar...
Time Magazine recently featured “The Silence Breakers” as its 2017 “Person of the Year,” a nod to the countless women who have come forward with stories of unwanted sexual advances and sexual assaults. But missing from the conversation are men. For example, a number of surveys have found that about 8 percent of men are...
When the news broke about a protest in Mashhad, Iran’s second largest city and a stronghold for the country’s religious hardliners, in the waning days of 2017 no one thought it would lead to a national rally against the government. But since then the demonstrations have rapidly spread to Iran’s other provinces and have left...
Every day about 100 people die in car crashes on U.S. roads. That death toll is a major reason why both Congress and the Trump administration are backing automotive efforts to develop and deploy self-driving cars as quickly as possible. However, officials’ eagerness far exceeds the degree to which the public views this as a...
Judge Richard A. Posner, a legendary judicial figure, retired abruptly earlier this month to make a point: People without lawyers are mistreated in the American legal system. In one of his final opinions as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, he expressed frustration at the dismissal of one...
“La Belle Sauvage” is the first volume of “The Book of Dust” series, in which the best-selling fantasy author Philip Pullman returns to the world of “His Dark Materials.” As a scholar of fantasy and children’s literature, I have been hoping for this novel for 17 years. The original trilogy, which consist of “The Golden...
After decades of bitter struggle, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge seems on the verge of being opened to the oil industry. The consensus tax bill Republicans are trying to pass retains this measure, which was added to gain the key vote of Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski. This bill, however, stands no chance of being the...