My favorite movie critic Ann Hornaday's Wash Post review of Black Panther.

Who here has seen it?  The 10:40 AM showing this past Saturday was sold out.  My favorite character was the smarty pants smart ass sister of the hero, Shuri.  She was precious.  My favorite line from the movie involved her: 

Toward the middle of Black Panther, Everett Ross (Martin Freeman) takes a bullet for Nakia (Lupita Nyong'o), who insists they do everything to save him. She and T'Challa deliver him to tech genius Shuri to repair him — and her reaction is funny and telling. "Another broken white boy to fix," she remarks, looking at his injured body. 

link: https://www.popsugar.com/entertainment/Why-Does-Shuri-Say-Another-Broken... (definitely the first, and possibly the last time, I will link to a popsugar article, here or anywhere else--but from memory they described the scene entirely accurately here)

Op-ed by Michael Gerson @ WashingtonPost.com, Feb. 19

On the same day as the Parkland school shooting, I found myself on the South Side of Chicago, talking with the victims and perpetrators of a different, continuing massacre [....]

Activists working with gang members describe a perfect storm of unintended consequences. The tearing down of Chicago’s high-rise, public housing monstrosities caused the diffusion of gang problems into other neighborhoods. Aggressive policing that put many gang leaders in prison also removed a source of structure in neighborhoods — leaving smaller groups (sometimes of three or four) engaged in chaotic, block-by-block warfare.

In this environment, relatively minor provocations — trash talk by a rap music star, social media disrespect, a stolen watch — can result in years of murder and revenge. What can be done? Programs such as BAM (Becoming a Man) employ a form of group therapy to keep young men from going off track [....]

It’s been dubbed "the loneliest tree on the planet" because of its remote location, but the Sitka spruce might represent something quite profound about the age in which we live.

Science.  It's what's for dinner.

By Rukmini Callimachi, Helene Cooper, Eric Schmitt, Alan Blinder and Thomas Gibbons-Neff

https://decolonialatlas.wordpress.com/2018/02/18/500-years-of-black-resi...

In 1526, the very first Africans arrived in North America as slaves of the San Miguel de Guadalupe colony. They promptly revolted and took refuge with the local indigenous people, becoming the first permanent non-native inhabitants of what would become the United States.

Cool map. There were pinpoints on this map of events I had never heard of. Like the 1803 Igbo Landing Mass Suicide or the 1823 Great Dismal Swamp Maroons.

Edited to fix links

I have no idea or particular opinion about whether Garrison Keillor is guilty of anything, though it's always struck me as odd.  But this somewhat but not quite illuminating article gums up the works a bit when taken as a part of a whole.  The whole, of course, being accusations flying hither and yon with little if any explanation - even when they could stand some.

By David Moskrop @ BostonReview.net, Feb. 7

On the hamster wheel of continual work, production and consumption, and Hebert Marcuse's.dreams.

[....] Marcuse did not live to see the 1980s, however [....] But his ideas lived on. In a 2004 essay for Harper’s magazine, for example, novelist and essayist Mark Slouka took to task the U.S. obsession with work [....]

Slouka brings his message home with the observation, “If we have no time to think, to mull, if we have no time to piece together the sudden associations and unexpected, mid-shower insights that are the stuff of independent opinion, then we are less citizens than cursors, easily manipulated, vulnerable to the currents of power.”

And here we are [.....]