‘Judas and the Black Messiah’ Suggests Wary Hope for Today’s Movement for Black Lives — Kendrick Lamar said on 2015’s To a Pimp a Butterfly (where it echoed like a wounded refrain), “I remember you was conflicted.” And in Judas and the Black Messiah (streaming since last Friday on HBO Max), just the opposite seems to apply: Fred Hampton, chairman of the Chicago chapter of…

The Truths We Hold: An American Journey by Kamala Harris Penguin Press, 336 pp., $30 The Democrats have a self-esteem problem in addition to a marketing problem. Meanwhile, we keep hearing that we should be wary of establishment-backed leaders like we are forever hearing that we should steer clear of…

The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump by Michiko Kakutani Tim Duggan Books, 208 pp., $22.00 In 1979, the year Michiko Kakutani joined the Times as a reporter, the culture was such that the predicament for thinking persons could be summed up in that politically…

In a 2010 interview with the “Juan Esptein” podcast, Jay-Z was asked somewhere around the halfway point by host Peter Rosenberg whether he’d listened to De La Soul during his formative years in Brooklyn. “Not so much” replied the Forbes-topping megastar, then basking in the success of “Empire State of…

Slick Rick The Great Adventures of Slick Rick The rap album, once a kind of misnomer for those who came up on novelty singles like “Rappin’ Duke” — and never thought that hip-hop would take it this far — had by 1988 become not only a thing in the world…

Birth of the World an exhibition at MoMA, New York City, February 24–June 15, 2019 Guide to the exhibition by Carolyn Lanchner (2008), 46 pp., $9.95 (paper) (distributed by the Museum of Modern Art) There’s an anecdote that’s now available to posterity wherein Ernest Hemingway went to great lengths, as…

MOOD: Studio Museum Artists in Residence 2018–19 an exhibition at MoMA PS1, New York City, June 9–September 8, 2019 Guide to the exhibition by Farrah Jasmine Griffin, Vivian A. Crockett, and Hannah Black Studio Museum, 36 pp., (distributed by Studio Magazine) The feeling you get when taking in for the…

Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today an exhibition at the Wallach Art Gallery, New York City, October 24, 2018–February 10, 2019; and the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, March 26–July 14, 2019 Catalog of the exhibition by Denise Murrell Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, 224 pp., $50.00 (distributed by Yale…

Ari Lennox Shea Butter Baby Ari Lennox definitely gotta have some nudes floating around out there. “New Apartment,” a brazen song off her fantastic debut, Shea Butter Baby talks up the joys of self-exposure (and coming into one’s own as an adult) with charmingly exhibitionist vibes: “I just got a…