Claudia Roth Pierpont on Nina Simone
This week we recommend Claudia Roth Pierpont’s thoughts on the life of Nina Simone, “A Raised Voice,“ over at the currently open archives of The New Yorker. As Roth Pierpont observes, controversy broke out earlier this year over the announcement of the selection of Zoe Saldana, “a movie star of Dominican descent and a light-skinned beauty along...
How to Kill a Vampire
Just in time for Halloween, making rounds on the internet again are pictures and videos of 19th-century vampire-hunting kits, boxes packed tight with everything you’d need to kill vampires. Most people who have them acknowledge that their collections are replicas, but some people are sure that they’ve got the real deal. Are these kits part of a...
Harrison Candelaria Fletcher in Newfound Journal
This week, Broad Street recommends a dreamlike collage essay by Harrison Candelaria Fletcher (whose piece in the “Hunt, Gather” issue recently was called “superb” in a review by New Pages). In “Artifacts,” published in the current issue of Newfound Journal, Fletcher offers an intimate, impressionistic portrait of his mother, who we see in a series of snapshots of...
Holding Pattern: designer Lauren O’Neill finds the art in Google and airports
CPH (Copenhagen. This image appeared in Broad Street 1.2, “Hunt, Gather”). Designer and artist Lauren O’Neill uses modern technology to create art out of everyday tools of modern life: Google, satellite imagery, and air travel. Her Tumblr blog, Holding Pattern, gathers bird’s-eye views of airports culled from Google Earth, revealing their abstract, sometimes breathtaking beauty. It’s...
Literature, Emptiness and Empathy
It is a popular opinion that literature promotes empathy in the reader. Author John Green says in his Crash Course video “How and Why We Read,“By understanding language, you will have a fuller understanding of lives other than your own.” In the above video, author Azar Nafisi agrees, asking the question at the 2014 American Library Association Annual...
