Why Hamilton Matters

Jeremy McCarter | BuzzFeed

“When people talk about the role of the arts in our national life, the conversation tends to be dominated by the culture wars, the flashpoints when some outré performance starts everybody screaming. But as the broad embrace of Hamilton demonstrates, artistic expression more often, and more powerfully, has been an integrating force in American life.”

On Kobe Bryant

Nikil Saval | n+1

“Late Kobe, like late Hemingway, was a throwback to himself. The violent jabstep; the crossover and pump-fake; the heedless drive into the lane against multiple defenders before the nervous retreat into the fadeaway, his body hinging and snapping, his oversized jersey billowing, his shot—more likely than not—clanging out. What once seemed like a kind of vicious genius became what it perhaps always was: theatrical, ritualistic gestures toward a game that no one played any more, and with reason.”

“Yet I’ll Speak”: Othello’s Emilia, a Rebuke to Female Silence

Caitlin Keefe Moran | The Toast

“How had no one ever told me about Emilia, who, in only a couple of lines, brings down one of the most conniving, merciless villains in all of Western literature? How had no one told me about this fantastic female character who defies not one but two sword-wielding men in order to make sure Desdemona, her mistress and friend, receives justice? I wanted to rip up my diploma.”

Hannah Horvath, Why Do We (Still) Hate Thee So?

Kathryn VanArendonk | Vulture

“Beyond that cultural framework, though, there’s another way to consider Hannah’s strangely potent impact on her audience: as a character on a TV show. She is, after all, not a real person, and not a direct extension of her creator, much though that conflation seems to plague her critics. She’s a construction, made for the express purpose of being viewed by others, and so it’s especially befuddling that she’s so constantly bad at pleasing us.”

The Marginalized African Songbird Who Finally Became Visible Again

Robin Kelley | The Conversation

“But Benjamin never strayed from her devotion to modern jazz as ‘the most liberating music on the planet.’ Ironically, that same commitment ensured her marginalization, as beautiful romantic ballads and torch songs lost their relevance in a highly nationalistic era of urban militancy. And as a colored South African woman working in a genre too often construed as black—and as white, male and essentially American—Benjamin had to struggle just to be heard.”

Calvin Trillin’s New Yorker Poem Wasn’t Just Offensive. It Was Bad Satire.

Katy Waldman | Slate

“Effective parodies have a double consciousness—the enlightened perspective of the poem both envelops and refutes the blinkered viewpoint of the speaker. Trillin’s verse doesn’t give us enough reason to think its parodic heart is any more honorable than its bigoted tongue. Sure, if he were a Chinese writer, we’d have extradiagetic reasons to trust him, but the poem itself shows little indication of objecting to what’s really objectionable about its insensitive narrator.”