From ASALH:
2026 marks a century of national commemorations of Black history. Dr. Carter Godwin Woodson, George Cleveland Hall, William B. Hartgrove, Jesse E. Moorland, Alexander L. Jackson, and James E. Stamps institutionalized the teaching, study, dissemination, and commemoration of Black history when they founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH) on September 9, 1915.
In 1925, when Dr. Carter G. Woodson planned the inaugural week-long observance of Black history, he could hardly have anticipated the imprint he would leave on the world. From Negro History Week to Black History Month, ASALH has carried forth the tradition, and the observances have become part of the warp and weft of American culture and increasingly the global community. For our 100th theme, the founders of Black History Month urge us to explore the impact and meaning of Black history and life commemorations in transforming the status of Black peoples in the modern world.
More here. (Note: Throughout February, at least one post will be devoted to Black History Month: A century of Black History Commemorations)
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At the core of Wang’s argument is the assertion that for all their similarities, the two countries often function as “inversions” of one another. Labels of capitalist, neoliberal, communist and socialist have limited utility when it comes to the United States and China of the present. Instead, Wang argues, China is best understood as an “engineering state”, while the United States is a “lawyerly society”.
Beginning with the Anglicanism of St Mary’s Church in Bromley, where Bowie sang in the choir, continuing with his immersion in Tibetan Buddhism in the late 1960s and on to the occultism of Aleister Crowley, Ormerod unpacks the religious preoccupations of Bowie’s art in compelling prose. But still, it all seems rather straightforward and the little stabs at philosophy (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and so on) feel a tiny bit Wiki.
Coppola’s adaptation cleaves relatively closely to the plot of Stoker’s novel, but Besson’s script replicates, almost exactly, only the parts of Coppola’s film that deviate from Stoker’s story. In both films, Dracula is explicitly the undead Vlad Ţepeș (the Wallachian warlord whose moniker Stoker borrowed while eschewing the rest of the actual history), in love with his wife, who dies during the Count’s fight against the Ottoman Empire. In both films, the character of Mina Murray is reimagined as the reincarnation and doppelgänger of said dead wife, and lengthy sequences are added in which Dracula and Mina have a secret courtship and fall in love. But in its deviation from Stoker’s text, Besson’s Dracula introduces some intriguing if somewhat underdeveloped ideas: Besson combines Renfield (Dracula’s asylum-bound thrall) and Lucy (his first victim) into a single character. The Van Helsing role is filled by an unnamed priest, played by Christoph Waltz, who muses about the obligations of lapsed Christians (like Dracula) to a God who has failed them. This Dracula also has all the visual hallmarks of a typical Besson film: an arresting, overblown style; intricately choreographed, dance-like action sequences (and dance sequences); slapstick with a 50 percent hit rate; weird, cutesy little CGI dudes.
An axolotl is a salamander with a superpower:
When Bad Bunny emerged from a row of towering sugar cane stalks to kick off his Super Bowl halftime show performance, it might have been easy to read the set design as little more than a lush backdrop: a tableau of Caribbean paradise imported to the Bay. Bad Bunny certainly didn’t explicitly acknowledge the sugar cane: He was too busy singing “Tití Me Preguntó,” a brash ode to his sexual prowess, which has racked up a billion streams both on Spotify and YouTube.
JAKARTA – Amid the excitement of the World Governments Summit (WGS) 2026 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE), a forum usually filled with majestic speeches, technological futurism and discussions of world leaders, there was a guest whose presence was the most silent, but his message was the most resounding. Nolan is the first human to receive a Neuralink brain implant, a breakthrough that has only been present in science fiction books. And in the forum held on February 3-5, Nolan brought a simple sentence: “This technology has brought my life back.” Nolan still remembers the day he was told he would be the first subject in human history to undergo a Neuralink implant. There were no tears, no long pauses like in a movie scene. There was urgency.