Roxane Gay and Yona Harvey will be writing a Marvel comic set in the world of Black Panther called World of Wakanda; Marvel interviewed Ta-Nehisi Coates (writer of Black Panther) and Gay about the new series: “It’s challenging but in a good way. As a fiction and nonfiction writer, it’s just me and the page but with this, there are so many people involved. It makes me admire the comic form even more, to see what it takes to pull an issue together.”
Kirsten Dunst is set to direct in a new film adaptation of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar; Dakota Fanning will star.
Judy Berman on the impact of Absolutely Fabulous on comedy: “There’s no doubt the show helped prepare U.S. audiences for the uncensored girl talk of Sex and the City, not to mention neurotic female comedy protagonists like 30 Rock‘s Liz Lemon. But it’s starting to seem like Ab Fab had its greatest influence on a younger generation of comedians—women who parked themselves on the couch, like I did, for hours-long Comedy Central marathons as teenagers. Now in their late twenties to mid thirties, they’re the ones creating and starring in feminist-minded shows about flawed, hedonistic, stubbornly independent female fuck-ups.”
Huck Magazine interviews Bat for Lashes’ Natasha Khan about her new album, The Bride: “When I was about eight or nine, I decided I was going to make my own skirt out of my mum’s pillowcase. I was really pleased with it and called for my best friend Lorraine. She was like, ‘Oh my God, why are you wearing a pillowcase?’ So obviously that mindset [suggests] I don’t really adhere to convention but I didn’t realise it at the time.”
The WNBA has withdrawn the fines they had imposed on players who wore plain black shirts in solidarity with Black Lives Matter during a warm-up.
Apogee interviews WS contributor Naomi Extra on their website: “I have been thinking a lot about the breadth of what artistic resistance looks like for black people right now and opportunities for cross-disciplinary collaboration. Recently, I went to the Sing Her Name concert in New York City. It was a tribute to Sandra Bland and featured the work of three black women composers. One of the pieces was a collaboration between poet Sharan Strange and musician, composer, and scholar, Courtney Bryan. Right now seems like a great moment to build and strengthen our artistic bonds across genre. I think that it’s time to bring the writers, the musicians, the activists, the dancers, the educators, and the painters, and the scholars together in one room. I’m constantly brainstorming ways to create this kind of radical artistic space.”
Harmony Holiday on Black libraries, with a call for donations to create another: “For years I’ve been collecting archives of black poetry, poetics, and jazz, and especially examples of the powerful force created when the three coalesce. Listening to these recordings reminds me that there are places in the language that words cannot reach. There are zones of action that mean as much to poetry and all of literature as the language itself does. Ways of being in the world that the poem can see, grab, even exploit to access its tonal intention.”
Fiona Apple’s Tidal turned twenty last week, and Pitchfork’s Jenn Pelly writes a tribute to its opening track, “Sleep to Dream”: “It is also as elemental, tough, and pissed as any punk song, but where punk is grounded in the notion of ‘us against the world,’ ‘Sleep to Dream’ is ‘me against the world.’ ‘The piano is percussive, you hit it,’ Fiona once said. ‘It was a huge release for me, just banging on it.’ There are other instruments, like a shadowy vibraphone, on ‘Sleep to Dream,’ but all I hear is rhythm and rhyme. Fiona is a wordsmith but more like a designer of armor through turns of phrase. I could put this on and become invincible.”
Zadie Smith writes a Brexit diary for The New York Review of Books: “Some of the reasoning was almost comically removed from the binary question posed. A friend whose mother still lives in the neighborhood describes a conversation over the garden fence, between her mother and a fellow North London leftist, who explained to my friend’s mother that she herself had voted Leave in order ‘to get rid of that bloody health secretary!’ Ah, like so many people across this great nation I also long to be free of the almost perfectly named Jeremy Hunt, but a referendum turns out to be a very ineffective hammer for a thousand crooked nails.”
Sarah Mirk at Bitch writes on how Octavia Butler predicted Trump’s campaign slogan: “The two books in the series, Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, were published in 1993 and 1998, but feel terribly resonant today. In Butler’s grim future, a hardcore patriarchal religious leader named Andrew Steele Jarret is running for president as the head of the Christian Americans party. And, as a couple people have pointed out, his fictional campaign uses the same slogan as real-life presidential candidate Donald Trump: Make America Great Again.”
Rafael Solorzano has created an animated video series that explains different Chicana Feminist Theory frameworks: “This video was created to bridge scholars and community activists who are engaging in campaigns that build community across cultures, creating new languages of resistance, and uplifting policies that empower our most marginalized communities. This video series is intended for an emerging generation of community activists, who are looking for frameworks that help them think critically about power, dominant ideologies, coalition building, heteropatriarchy, and multisided resistance.”
Eight female cartoonists, including Rebecca Cohen, Juana Medina, and Vanessa Valadez give advice to Hillary Clinton.
