Esteemed filmmaker Spike Lee received a Tribute Award at the Mill Valley Film Festival this weekend. While on stage with Oakland-based actor Delroy Lindo, who starred in four of Lee's films, Lee suddenly remembered he directed the 2004 film As the Chronicle reports, Lee was on stage with Lindo, who most recently starred in the Ryan Coogler film , when it dawned on Lee that he'd shot a film entirely in San Francisco. Struggling to remember the film's name, Lee asked the audience to pull up IMDB.
In her new album, The Life of a Showgirl, Taylor Swift invites us into the psychological backstage of fame. One of the album's more provocative tracks, "Actually Romantic," has been widely interpreted as a diss track. While fans and critics alike often have a hard time reaching agreement on who Swift references in her bops, many believe "Actually Romantic" targets fellow pop icon Charli XCX. The track highlights Charli's reported drug use and likens Charli's critical attention to Taylor to infatuation.
At the sixth edition of the Aichi Triennale, which opened in Japan in September, wars and their effects loom large. The exhibition's title, A Time Between Ashes and Roses (until 30 November), comes from a line in a poem by the Syrian poet Adonis about the cycle of destruction and rebirth, observed through nature. It resonates throughout this year's event, where war, displacement, memory and the natural world are interwoven across venues in Aichi Prefecture, located to the west of Tokyo.
October 7, 2023, caught Israel off guard. That day, Hamas fighters and other terrorist militias overcame Gaza's fortified border and launched an attack in Israel, killing nearly 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages back to the small Palestinian territory. The experience of such vulnerability led to a trauma still being felt in Israel today. On October 8, 2023, Israel's government launched an attack on Gaza, and the two years since have been horrific for Palestinians in the enclave.
This is a novel of ideas, as well as, at its most elemental, a tangled love story. Desai's characters inhabit a complex post-modern, post-colonial world and, yet, her own sensibility as a novelist is playfully old-fashioned. Consider the contrivance Desai brazenly concocts to enable a central moment of this story: a chance meeting on an overnight train between the two title characters after they've each rejected their own families' formal attempts to arrange a marriage between them. Dickens, himself, might have blushed.
I rushed outside and then, when the water reached six feet, climbed on to the roof with my children, Nawaz says. That night and the following morning, we had nothing to eat. While on the rooftop, my little boy kept asking when we could go home downstairs, but our home was already submerged. The water had nearly reached the roof when rescue teams finally arrived the next afternoon to take us to the camps by boat, and it reached a maximum of 22 feet, says Nawaz.
The roadmap for a solution in Suwayda includes holding accountable those who attacked civilians, continuing humanitarian and medical aid, compensating those affected, ensuring the return of displaced persons, restoring basic services, deploying local Interior Ministry forces to protect roads, uncovering the fate of missing persons and returning abductees, Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shibani said in a news release on Tuesday after meeting with his Jordanian counterpart Ayman Safadi and US Syria's envoy Tom Barrack in Damascus.
I had just started teaching at a school in the Bekaa valley when war broke out in September 2024. Within days, an Israeli bomb tore through my family home. One minute we were eating lunch, the next the walls were collapsing around us and on to my car outside. I had spent three years saving for that Honda Civic, so when I saw it destroyed, I broke down in tears.