Books
Aliette de Bodard’s A Fire Born of Exile (Xuya Universe Romances #2)
Elaine U. Cho’s Teo’s Durumi (The Alliance #2)
Alexis Daria’s Along Came Amor (Primas of Power #3)
Antonia Hodgson’s The Raven Scholar (Eternal Path Trilogy #1)
Yudori’s Raging Clouds
Music
Jung Kook (ft. Latto)’s Seven (Dani J Bachata remix)
Sammy Rae & The Friends’ That’s All
Vinny Rivera, Dj Magic Flow & DerekVinci’s Plan
Ed Sheeran’s Azizam
Rebecca Sugar’s Hill to Die On
The Voices of East Harlem’s Right On Be Free
Xavi & Manuel Turizo’s En Privado
EJAE and Andrew Choi’s Free
HUNTR/X’s This Is What It Sounds Like, Golden, How It’s Done
TWICE’s Strategy
From Red Hot’s TRANƧA:
Cole Pulice + Hunter Schafer’s III. Under the Shadow of Another Moon (Dark Night)
Arthur Baker feat. Pharoah Sanders’s Love Hymn
Kara Jackson + Ahya Simone + Dave Longstreth’s My Name
Yaya Bey’s A Survivor’s Guilt
Gia Margaret’s Mourning Dove
Allison Russell + Ahya Simone’s Any Other Way
Green-House + Kelela’s VII. Within Without (Liberation)
Bartees Strange + Anjimile + Kara Jackson’s Wolf Like Me
Time Wharp + Elizabeth & Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s Always
Misc.
TV: A Starstruck Odyssey (rewatch)
Podcast: The Wizard, the Witch, and the Wild One (Chapter 4)
Live: Detour Productions’ Pompeii
Live: excerpt of Gerald Arpino’s Light Rain
Articles
Charlie Jane Anders’ Lessons in Magic and Disaster is OUT TODAY. Here’s the origin story…
“But lately, I’ve started to think of myself more as a therapeutic writer, because I find my work going back again and again two things of healing and understanding. As I’ve said many times lately, I love stories where people learn to see each other — and themselves — more clearly. And I’m increasingly interested in how people find their way to healing and restoration, rather than the climax being a huge explosion.”
Kaleigh Donaldson’s At Romance Con, the Shadow of J.K. Rowling and Questions of Fan Culpability Loom Overhead
If you enjoyed Tori’s The Dramione Dilemma, another article that covers similar terrain.
MacKenzie Fegan’s The crazy true love story behind one of my favorite S.F. lunch spots
I love a story where arranged marriages work out and provide freedom and opportunity. “…the romance of Mohammad and Rabia Waqar, the owners of Mashaallah Halal Pakistani Food Restaurant.”
Ashley C. Ford’s Seven Years Into My Marriage, I Finally Stopped Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop
“I still waited for that hovering other shoe to drop. In the darkest corners of my mind, I left room for my old friend Disappointment. I waited to feel stuck or unsure or abandoned. I waited for what felt familiar.
“…What I’ve ultimately decided is that those are moot questions. If I’m honest with myself, the worrying and avoidance have never saved me from disappointment, not even once. They’ve only been tools I used to rob myself of the excitement and joy I’ve always been entitled to. At some point, I have to decide that the pleasure of my marriage is sweeter than the anticipation of bitterness. In fact, I’ll make that decision now. Because that’s what I truly want.”
Rachel Kurzius’ Fan fiction is everywhere, if you know how to look
““They’re making a lot of money to write the sanctioned big-budget thing on the BBC. And they have a different set of priorities. They have a different set of monetary rewards, different relationship with the source material, with the rights holders,” she says. By contrast, “fan fiction is all about the gift economy.”
Jamison has also come to a narrower understanding of fan fiction, one that has more to do with writing for its own sake, without an eye to profit or reward. It’s about “the personal satisfaction of [writing] and then the personal satisfaction of reading something by somebody else who loves or has strong feelings about the same thing that you do,” she says. “In many ways, fan fiction is so much more free because you don’t have to worry about the market or the demographic.””
“In exploring this character’s heart, might they [writers] better understand their own?”
Leah Pipezna-Samarasinha’s this body keeps me up at night
“Toni Cade Bambara’s life and legacy but the film really lifted up and hammered home for me what being a cultural worker is- not a brand, not an influencer, not a servant, not an “icon,” but someone who is making art and asking questions and lying in wait/ listening for the words as a worker for self and community. Toni signed her books. “Be Dangerous.” Being a cultural worker is about being dangerous and making work that is dangerous.”
Vanessa Angélica Villareal’s What Happens When ICE Comes to Your School
“we have lost narrative control of reality. Migration is imagined for us as an invasion, as the threat of replacement by a monstrous, racialized Other. To move toward life in exchange for one’s labor becomes a contract of social death. In the Western imagination, the migrant is constructed as monstrous—the killer in the bushes, the gang member, the drug trafficker, the mass invasion—all to maintain the fiction of imagined borders, imagined nations, imagined racial and ethnic identities that have never and will never be stable. The migrant, when imagined as monstrous—displaced, criminalized, racialized, impoverished—is no longer redeemable as human; the migrant is the walking dead.”
“what’s at stake when ICE comes into schools: the imagination. Specifically, our children’s imaginations and how they envision our futures.”
“What if the adults they rely on for safety think everything is a monster too? How are children being taught to think about migrants? And if they are not taught to think of them at all, what are they taught a hero looks like or doesn’t? What are the stories we tell and retell ourselves, and what are migrants’ place in it? How does documentation become embodied in a person? What are its markers? Are “papers” and “legality” just another way to racialize, profile, and alienate someone? How does that wound a child’s imagination of the world and the people in it? What does it do to a child to see their classmates, or classmates’ parents, taken by ICE at pickup or graduation? How does surveillance and abduction become internalized, the sensation of always being watched? How are we teaching children to envision the world? As an expansive, more possible thing? Or as enforced borders and racial geographies, soil as blood as nation, legal and illegal?
To raise a child is to constantly shape and interact with a budding imagination”
“I worry so much about the imagination because it is already so hard to imagine any other world than this one. Every story we tell ourselves, and retell to our children, is part of a collective world-building project; we choose to imagine the same world every day, reproduce made-up borders, identities, hierarchies, debts. Children possess the sense of radical possibility needed to liberate us from such brutal futures and to choose to build a different world. But when the future’s authorship is being so easily relinquished to AI, with our thinking and imagining coming from machines that can only reproduce what we’ve already thought—the fiction of race, the fear of the Other, the story of domination”
Esther O. Lee 