Arts & Culture

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power returned for its second season, bringing viewers back to a sprawling story inspired by the works of J.R.R. Tolkien.

Loosely inspired by the experiences of Latoya Ammons in Gary, Ind., Netflix’s The Deliverance follows single mother Ebony Jackson as she battles demons, her past, and systems entrenched with racism and sexism — all to save her family.

THE VEGETABLES ARE trying to kill me. I am drowning in vegetables. I clock out of my home office, and there are the vegetables. I take weekend trips, come home, and there are the vegetables. I can’t sleep, because deep in the corners of my mind, the vegetables are there — slowly rotting, mocking me, blaming me for their inevitable demise.

This is not a horror movie. This is a CSA subscription.

Short for “community-supported agriculture,” CSAs provide subscribers a selection of farm-fresh seasonal produce every week. They are a sustainable and often cost-effective way to eat local and give back to your community. They are also a terrific way to spend hours chopping vegetables and Googling “kohlrabi.”

In the pre-pandemic years, I, a black-and-white-moral-thinking-trying-to-do-right no-matter-the-cost twentysomething, signed up for a CSA every spring. Rarely have I experienced more anxiety, more rage, and more helplessness than when faced with a brand-new “single-sized” (but still enormous) bag of produce while most of the previous week’s veggies remained untouched and rapidly softening. Yet I, ever the Good Consumer, stressed myself silly over produce season after season, because what choice did I have? I couldn’t destroy the planet.

IN SOME WAYS it’s hard to appreciate today the significance of Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Much of what he wrote that was then viewed as heresy by the Catholic Jesuit Order — that the story of Adam and Eve is not scientific fact; that God’s creative work did not end with Genesis, but rather continues through evolution; that the entire material universe is at its core spiritual and grace-filled — are ideas that are now widely accepted within the church. In fact, Teilhard’s thoughts on the sacramentality of the world lie unabashedly at the heart of much of what Pope Francis has said about the environment.

The new PBS documentary Teilhard: Visionary Scientist paints a masterful and unexpectedly emotional portrait of this French priest who spent his life suffering for his love of the church and the world. Beginning with his youth and drawing frequently on his own words, Visionary Scientist walks with Teilhard as he is dazzled by the wonders of nature around his family’s home in Auvergne, then follows him into the Jesuits, where he’s taught that a religious vocation requires one to shun the world, to view it with contempt.

IN 2015, I visited two plantations in rural Louisiana to write a college paper on white supremacy. One, Whitney Plantation, centered the experiences of enslaved people by sharing “firsthand accounts” and including statues of and memorials to them. The other, Oak Alley Plantation, romanticized the Antebellum South. Filled with indignation, I could not fathom how tourists at Oak Alley drank mint juleps where brutality, violence, and terror once reigned. Clint Smith, author of How the Word Is Passed, studies sites of racialized violence in the U.S. to help form a more accurate American “public memory.” We need Smith’s poetic-sociological vision to help us tell the true, humanizing stories of our — often ugly — history.

During my visit, Oak Alley sold copies of Little Black Sambo by Scottish author-illustrator Helen Bannerman in its gift shop (the shop no longer sells this title). A racist children’s book about a family that is widely understood to be Tamil, the 1899 children’s book portrays dark-skinned Indian people through heavy “pickaninny” caricature. In the book Racial Innocence historian Robin Bernstein explains, “The pickaninny was an imagined, subhuman black juvenile who was typically depicted outdoors, merrily accepting (or even inviting) violence.” The dangerous trope desensitizes us to violence against Black and brown children, evidenced throughout history from slavery to police brutality. My family is part Tamil, and I nearly choked when I saw this “artifact” of dehumanization dressed up as nostalgia.

IT'S HARD TO understand what motivates Owen, in part because he is almost always alone. The lead in I Saw the TV Glow (played by Ian Foreman and later Justice Smith) is near-always inert, save for when it comes to his favorite television show: The Pink Opaque.

When the lonely seventh grader discovers that a disaffected girl two grades older than him, Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), also stays up late to watch the monster of the week show, he sneaks out to watch it with her. It is one of the most radical acts he takes.

Set in an anonymous suburb in 1996, the two gather every Friday to watch the show, a Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twin Peaks composite about supernaturally empowered teens who defend their suburban county against the evil Mr. Melancholy. Together they fall into the show’s immersive lore to escape their own hardships — an abusive stepfather, a chronically ill mother. As Maddy explains, the show “feels more real than real life.”

THE DRIVER [WHO killed a counter-demonstrator] at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville was from Ohio. I kept thinking “This is the picture people are going to have of people from my area.” I offered to do 10 racist [tattoo] cover-ups for free. We had a large outpouring, and we haven’t stopped. We’ve done hundreds in the past six years.

All kinds of people have approached us: reformed prison inmates, Aryan Brotherhood — dudes and women alike — who got prison racial gang tattoos, almost as a means of survival, and now they’re out; ex-Klan members, ex-white nationalists, and militia party members; people with human trafficking tattoos [or] self-harm scars.

“To me being Christian means f---ing s--- up,” Layshia Clarendon told ESPN’s Katie Barnes. “That’s what Jesus came to do. It means disrupting and fighting for the most marginalized people.” During the 2020 WNBA season, they helped lead players in protesting police violence against Breonna Taylor and other Black women. Clarendon helped launch the WNBA’s Social Justice Council, alongside players like Sydney Colson, Breanna Stewart, Tierra Ruffin-Pratt, A’ja Wilson, and Satou Sabally. Clarendon signed on to the Athletes for Ceasefire in Gaza, and they launched a foundation to provide grants that help transgender people access health care and other services.

In recent years, the work of librarians has been sucked into the center of the “culture wars” as fascist and authoritarian movements in the U.S. attempt to censor materials, especially about queerness and racial justice. Meanwhile, justice movements have recognized how libraries are a shining example of public-funded community goods.