Tag Archive for: 2022

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FESTIVAL KEYNOTE! Fatherhood and Transformation: Shaka Senghor on Honesty and Healing

If you’ve never heard Shaka Senghor speak, prepare to be transformed. A renowned author and activist who has been interviewed by Oprah, Trevor Noah, and others, Senghor is today's most important voice for men—whether fathers or sons—and…
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J Dilla: The Beatmaker Who Changed The Way Musicians Play

Discover a hidden genius—a man whom the greatest figures of contemporary pop call a “demigod” of music. J Dilla, who died in 2006 at the age of 32, never had a mainstream pop hit, but he created a new “time-feel” that forever changed…
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Red Carpet: China, Hollywood, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy

Who decides what films appear at your local theater or on your TV screen? Would you guess Xi Jinping, autocratic President of the People’s Republic of China? Wall Street Journal film industry reporter Erich Schwartzel and veteran China watcher…
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Mother, Daughter, Collaborators (Plus the Book That Changed the World of Food): The Lappés

Extraordinary mothers, extraordinary daughters: together, they can change the world. Frances and Anna Lappé prove that, when it comes to visionary thought and action, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Frances “changed how we eat”…
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Claiming Space for the Self: Limitation and Liberation

What does it mean to unapologetically take up space when your body is different from everyone else's? Born with the rare congenital condition sacral agenesis, Chloé Cooper Jones (Easy Beauty) learned to cope with her physical pain—and the…
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Writing a Path Out of Darkness: Writers on Mourning

Grief: one of the most complicated, isolating, yet potentially healing states a person can experience, it often defies description. These authors’ stories, whether drawn from lived experience or imagination, give voice to the unspeakable parts…
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The Last Wild Horses: Maja Lunde on Her “Climate Quartet”

Horses hold a special mystique: poetry in motion, wildness and discipline in equal measure, an untamed spirit tempered by sculptural beauty and lightning-bolt speed. What if the most beautiful of the world's horses were to go extinct? Maja Lunde,…
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Buster Keaton and the Dawn of Cinema

“All my life, I've been happiest when folks watching me said to each other, 'Look at the poor dope, will ya?’” Humility aside, Buster Keaton, aka “The Great Stone Face,” shares equal stature with Charlie Chaplin as a comic genius and…
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Cultures and Complexities: California’s Hidden Stories in History, Fiction, Poetry and Memoir

Tech empires, movie sets, surfers with golden tans: that's California, right? Not so fast. The California that exists beyond the stereotypes is much more complex and interesting. National Book Award finalist Susan Straight’s Mecca (says Viet…
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Fear and Loathing in San Francisco: Hunter S. Thompson’s Savage Journey to Gonzo

Why is the wild, woolly writing of Hunter S. Thompson, the legendary Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas author, still so urgently relevant today? By inventing a whole new genre—"Gonzo journalism"—he, and the brilliant minds he influenced (Joan…