I first met Langston Hughes in 1990. He’d been dead some twenty-three years by then, and I was a few months shy of my twenty-first birthday. We met almost by accident. It […]
Honoring Langston Hughes
Freddie Mercury
In 1995, only a year after South Africa’s first democratic election, I was working at a community centre in Nyanga, a shanty-town alongside Cape Town’s international airport. The centre had started a […]
The Souls of Black Folk and the Legacy of W.E.B. Du Bois
The sense of awakening in The Souls of Black Folk is impossible to miss. Published in 1903, when the new century itself was just awakening, Souls seemed to blink away the veil […]
Mary Shelley LIVES! (Romantics, Luddites, runaway technology, science fiction and the persistence of the Frankenstein Complex)
Oh, yeah. Oooh, ahhh, that’s how it always starts. Then later there’s running and screaming. – Dr. Ian Malcolm Mary Shelley spent the summer of 1816 at the Villa Diodati near Lake […]
A valiant and fearless truth-teller: Tim Hetherington
by Richard Allen Smith Within two months of arriving in Afghanistan in 2007, I was sitting in the back of one of the few Humvees on Kandahar Air Field that wasn’t up-armored. […]
On Richard Pryor: It was something he said
The great medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer created timeless characters in his Canterbury Tales; archetypal personalities such as the Wife of Bath and the Miller endure to this day. Through them Chaucer could […]
Nonviolence guru Gene Sharp gets his due
A humble political scientist created the world’s most widely used strategies for toppling authoritarian regimes, but he was once viciously attacked by, of all groups, the left.
Remembering Edward Said
The recent popular democratic movements in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa would have delighted the late Edward Said, although he would also be properly appalled by the […]
The grace, courage and humanity of Terry Pratchett
“I would like to die peacefully with Thomas Tallis on my iPod before the disease takes me over and I hope that will not be for quite some time to come, because if I knew that I could die at any time I wanted, then suddenly every day would be as precious as a million pounds. If I knew that I could die, I would live. My life, my death, my choice…”
