Christopher T. Conner in The Conversation:
After the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, former NBA player Royce White became an outspoken advocate of defunding the police. Over those ensuing months, he appeared at a number of protests and marches in Minnesota – demonstrations that conservative politicians and pundits excoriated.
Four years later, White accepted the endorsement of the Minnesota GOP in the state’s 2024 U.S. Senate race.
In the interim, White had appeared on the show of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, where he decried the “establishment” and “corporatocracy.” While on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, he complained that women “had become too mouthy.” Elsewhere, he lambasted the LGBTQ+ movement as “Luciferian” and described Israel as the vanguard of a “new world order.”
White’s transition from an NBA player who advocated for progressive causes to an acolyte of Jones is more common than you might think.
More here.
When Schwartz comes up in conversation today, two things are typically remarked of him. First, he is a man whose reputation has eclipsed his work, his stature as a poet having surrendered to the clamor for myth. Second, this myth is one of vertiginous and scandalous decline. Delmore Schwartz: an American tragedy. Both commonplaces have the unfortunate merit of being true.
The coincidence of the centenary of Kafka’s death, on 3 June, and the publication of the first complete, uncensored 
What are the most basic elements of love and how can we manifest them in our lives and our relationships? This is the question that Thich Nhat Hanh tackles in his short book, ‘True Love’. Looking at human love through the lens of Buddhist teaching, he breaks it down into four aspects: loving-kindness, compassion, joy and freedom and uses his direct and simple style to advise us how to put these elements to work in our own lives. 
When Daniel Dennett’s essay collection “Brainstorms” was published in 1978, the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science was just emerging. Dennett was a young scholar who wanted to get philosophers out of their armchairs and into conversations with psychologists, linguists, and computer scientists. “I tried in ‘Brainstorms’ to write about the problems in language accessible to all serious thinkers, as jargon-free as possible, with lots of examples,” he writes in the preface to 
Scientists have successfully developed a new, controllable prosthetic extra thumb designed to enhance productivity.
At the dawn of the twenty-first century India’s intellectual classes professed a cautious optimism – verging at times on self-congratulation – about the nation’s tryst with democracy. For many, the unruly coalition governments of the late 1990s and early 2000s reflected the deepening of democratic norms and a shared commitment to the peaceful transfer of power. Others pointed to high voter turnouts – especially among the poor – and the rise of elected representatives from hitherto subordinated castes as proof that democracy had been profoundly vernacularized.
At the heart of Pop Art, Lichtenstein adeptly appropriated and reimagined iconic symbols, from Mickey Mouse to love and war comics, to popular advertising motifs. Through his masterful reinterpretations, he challenged conventional notions of high and low culture, inviting viewers to reconsider the significance of everyday imagery in the realm of art.
Anthony Fauci, the former head of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), emphatically fended off allegations at a Republican-led hearing in Washington DC today that his agency funded research that created the COVID-19 pandemic or that he coordinated a cover-up of the pandemic’s origins, calling the claims “simply preposterous”. The 3 June session was one of the most anticipated hearings hosted by the US House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. The subcommittee has held 27 hearings or briefings over the past 15 months to examine the federal government’s response to the pandemic and 
Ibram X. Kendi has a notebook that prompts him, on every other page, to write down “Things to be grateful for.” There are many things he might put under that heading. First and foremost, his wife and two daughters, and his health, having made it through Stage 4 colon cancer in his 30s — a diagnosis with a 12 percent survival rate. Tenure at Boston University, where Martin Luther King Jr. earned his doctorate in theology. A National Book Award, and a MacArthur “genius” grant for “transforming how many people understand, discuss and attempt to redress America’s longstanding racial challenges.” Then there were the millions of people who bought “How to Be an Antiracist,” the first of five of his books to take the No. 1 spot on the New York Times best-seller list. But he was particularly grateful to the readers who wrote to him to say his work changed them for the better.
The stories selected in Family Furnishings, a fine and timely follow-up to Alice Munro’s winning of the 2013 Nobel Prize, date (it says on the cover) from 1995 to 2014, thus making a sequel to the Selected Stories of 1996, which drew on the previous thirty years of Munro’s writing. But there is one exception to this dating in the new selection, the magnificent story “Home.” “Home” was first published in a collection of Canadian stories in 1974, so it was written when Munro was in her early forties. She then went on working on it for thirty years, revising, correcting, and changing its shape, and it was republished in much-altered form in 2006: so it appears here as a “late” story. That process of revisiting is fundamental to Munro’s methods. She constantly revises her work; she reuses her subject matter with the utmost concentration and attention; and her characters, like her (and often they are like her), compulsively return to their pasts.
Dear Reader,
For a few years now I’ve been teaching a class on erotic writing. Most of it follows the same structure of any creative-writing class—we discuss character and motivation—but the content, you can imagine, takes on a different slant.