Arts + Letters

In the summer of 1964 the Democratic Party was a bastion of white supremacy in Mississippi, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee sent its foot soldiers to attempt to register black voters in the face of lethal racism. Read more about Jon Else Tells Tales from Blackside »

If Donald Trump has his Boswell, it could well be Milo Yiannopoulos. The proudly gay Brit-born scribe has disrupted expectations on what it means to be a far-right provocateur, styling fabulous fashions and a smashing haircut even as he excoriates feminism, multiculturalism, environmentalism, and globalism—pretty much any ism that isn’t nativism. He is a champion of President-Elect Trump—whom he has been known to call daddy—and if he isn’t a white supremacist, he has undeniably given white supremacists a platform. Read more about Milo's Wild Ride, Now Featuring Campus Tour and Book Deal »

In a corner of the Digital Imaging Lab in the basement of UC Berkeley’s Moffitt Library, recent graduate Olivia Dill is checking on the latest shipment of fragile wax recordings from the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology. These hard wax tubes, invented by Thomas Edison in the 1880s, are one of the earliest sound recording media. Read more about Waxing Poetic: New Tech Revives Sounds from Past Treasures »

Like most businesses this time of year, the Kingfish Pub in North Oakland is decked out for the Holidays, strung with lights and garlanded with pine boughs. There’s a neon sign in the window advertising Anchor Steam Christmas Ale and a wreath hangs in the middle of the marquee that juts out from the low-slung, conifer-green facade and sags like the bow of a foundering ship. It almost looks as if the whole place might sink beneath the pavement. But while many another watering hole has sunk and vanished over the years, the Kingfish abides. Read more about Christmas at the Kingfish »

Many Americans are fired up in a bad way about Trump getting elected, and the Revolutionary Communist Party, aka RevCom, founded in 1975 by UC Berkeley grad and party chairman Bob Avakian, are particularly vocal about it. A stroll by Revolution Books, in the alleyway just west of Telegraph, between Durant Avenue and Channing Way, will tell you as much. Outside the store sits a signboard with a large poster of Trump in a KKK cap, complete with Hitler-stache—an image made all the more sinister by the gloom of the dark, rainy skies that have been drowning the Bay in the wake of the election. Read more about The Struggle Continues: Checking in With Revolution Books »

Not everyone would choose as feminist hero a beleaguered wife who goes through a test of fire to prove her purity. Sally Sutherland Goldman has convincingly argued just that in her essay for the catalogue of The Rama Epic: Hero, Heroine, Ally, Foe at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum through January 15.

“An abused wife and yet a feminist heroine, she possesses a voice that continues to be heard as a powerful index to cultural norms, anxieties and resistances,” Goldman writes at the end of her essay, “A Heroine’s Journey.” Read more about New Luster for an Ancient Legend »

The Nobel Committee announced this morning that an American had won the Nobel Prize for Literature.  Read more about Rockin' the Nobel: Reactions to Dylan's Literature Prize »