Drawn to Blake In Ross Glass’s 2020 psychological horror film, Saint Maud, the title character, a hospice nurse who has recently converted to an extremely ascetic form of Catholicism after a hedonistic earlier phase, is given a book of William Blake’s prints (Morton Paley’s 1978 Phaidon edition) by the woman in her care, Amanda. Viewers […]

The Lived Experiences of African International Students in the United Kingdom: Reactions to the Law through the Lens of Precarity and Consciousness By James Marson, Mohammed Dirisu and Katy Ferris The United Kingdom is largely a welcoming place for international students. The country sees the benefit of international visitors engaging with various communities, enriching society […]

Travel writing, as its name suggests, would seem to require travel in order to be effectively produced. After all, how can one write about your experience of visiting foreign lands if you’re unable to travel to them in the first place? Yet, that is precisely the situation that an entire community of academics and writers […]

Although I have written about 3D films before in A History of Narrative Film (HNF, W. W. Norton, 1981; 1990; 1996; 2004; 2016) – both polarized and digital – in Chapters 12 and 21 respectively, I wanted to understand stereoscopy in moving images better and thought an historical survey of the various processes used to […]

Some of the most memorable educators are the ones willing to throw out the syllabus in pursuit of a higher lesson. When a fourth-grade teacher in Roseburg, Oregon, did just that during the height of the Cold War, he sent the US state department and J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI into a tizzy. In a search […]

Seventy-one years ago, Dr. Richard Lawler led a team of surgeons and nurses in performing the world’s first solid organ transplant by grafting a kidney from a just-deceased patient into the abdomen of a 44-year-old Chicago woman. She lived nearly five more years. In the decades that followed that groundbreaking operation at Little Company of […]

Wahoo ‘Round Midnight This Time the Dream’s on Me Dizzy Atmosphere Night In Tunisia Move The Street Beat Out Of Nowhere Little Willie Leaps / 52nd Street Theme Ornithology I’ll Remember April / 52nd Street ThemeFats Navarro, trumpet; Charlie Parker, alto sax; Bud Powell, piano; Curly Russell, bass; Art Blakey, drums. Embraceable You Cool Blues […]

Much was heard lately about the emergence of a new Cold War between the United States and China. There is something both reassuring and disturbing about this confrontation: reassuring because we find in it something familiar and what we have overcome in the past in the case of the Soviet Union. And worrying of course […]

“It is possible that we exist in a predominantly narcissistic society – in which people want you to love them; and then they don’t want you anymore.” I occupy these worlds: jazz and academia. The jazz world is filled with pandering, patronage (real and false), banter and fastidious applause; meanwhile, the hallowed, homogenous halls of […]