In Hollywood, a Netflix miniseries created by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, viewers are invited to imagine a 1940s America in which racism is an aberration.

In the time of online viewing rooms, film and video are the media that are native to our screens. There is no flattening or distortion to make the viewer long for the days when brushstrokes, surface texture and depth could easily be taken in with the naked eye. We are addicted to screens and we are attracted to the moving image.

Interweaving archaeological evidence with speculative fiction, Cecilia Dougherty’s web-based drama Time Before Memory (2019) interrogates the origins of our species and prompts reflection on its present state.

I thought about her last week — June 9th was MilDred's birthday. She was a true Gemini: two-spirited, intelligent, her default setting was creative fluidity.

We see the inexplicable as proof of the divine, and so much of our culture revolves around a yearning to discover traces of something out of the ordinary: angelic and ghostly sightings, extraterrestrial visitors, Atlantis, the list stretches on. Mike Ballou’s semi-secret works at the western entrance to Cooper Park in East Williamsburg are a much-needed invocation of the supernatural.

Amid protests in Minnesota and other major cities in the United States and abroad—in reaction to the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and countless Black people before them—Donald Trump wrote a tweet on May 29th invoking a statement made by racist Miami police Chief Walter Headley in 1967: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.”