The death penalty in America always incites controversy. Last year, Alabama took three hours to administer their lethal injection drugs. Idaho had to pause an execution for the lack of those drugs. And two people on death row were exonerated. The larger long-term...
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The World Is Burning — Whatever Tops the BFI’s ‘Best Films of All Time’ Won’t Help
The British Film Institute (BFI) just released its Best Films of All Time poll for 2022 to much fanfare and self-congratulation among liberal whites. I can almost sense them patting each other on the back — or exchanging poorly executed high fives — for a job well...
News from Iranian Women, in Their Own Voices
I had been contacted by a few Iranian women to speak with them just shortly after Mahsa Amini’s death and the demonstrations/revolution began. Then later I contacted them to ask whether the new decree to disband the “Morality Police” was of any real consequence for...
#TheHolocaust on Social Media
“What if a girl in the Holocaust had Instagram?” The Instagram account @eva.stories is a social media project produced by Israeli tech entrepreneur Mati Kochavi. It launched on May 1, 2019, the day before Yom HaShoah, Israel’s annual Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’...
Is the Video Essay a New Avant-Garde?
The recent emergence of what has come to be called the video essay or the videographic essay or the audiovisual essay represents a new cinematic avant-garde. It offers implicit and explicit critiques of both commercial media and the logocentric literature of academic...
On Appalachian Floods and Climate Grief
One of my first childhood memories revolves around a flood. I was an apple-cheeked pre-schooler, hair in a bowl cut, camping with my hippie-folkie parents at an old-time fiddlers’ convention in Ivydale, West Virginia. Hard rain brought flash floods, and the creek...
How US War Coverage Fails to Further the Necessity of Peace
To address these intensifying humanitarian crises, the United Nations and other multilateral institutions must intervene to contain Russia and pave a path to a peaceful resolution. And it is the responsibility of media organizations across the globe to demand these institutions focus on this peace building.
How Ukrainian Film Collectives Build Digital Archives and Stream the War
The continuing Russia-Ukraine War demands new ways of thinking both about media coverage that seeks to inform in real time and new strategies about how to document it in order to build alternative archives.
You Cannot Silence Us: Exiled Writers Speak At Ithaca College
On September 22, the Park Center for Independent Media hosted a discussion with dissident writers who were forced from their homelands and found sanctuary through a City of Asylum in Ithaca, Pittsburgh, or Detroit. The event, which was attended by nearly 70 Ithaca...
Upending Arthur Miller: A Clarion Call to Our Cultural Emergency
Gleitman’s book, “Anxious Masculinity in the Drama of Arthur Miller and Beyond,” begins by confronting the dominant figure of 1950s American drama, the male breadwinner and his anxiety about displacement from the center of economic and cultural relevance. It traces its resonances outward to our contemporary moment.