Life and the Arts

A reflection on life and the arts from a progressive perspective. Here you will find social commentary on movies, the performing arts, issues of cultural significance and life in general.

Mimicry Is Not Solidarity: Rachel Dolezal and the Creation of Antiracist White Identity

Picture: Rachel Dolezal, the white American woman who changed her looks so she could pass for black, courtesy AlterNet. Tim Wise - In a country where being black increases your likelihood of being unemployed, poor, rejected for a bank loan, suspected of wrongdoing and profiled as a criminal, being arrested or even shot by police, the mind boggles at Rachel Dolezal's decision some years ago to begin posing as an African American. Yes perhaps blackness helps when you’re looking for a job in an Africana Studies department, selling your own African American portraiture art, or hoping to head up the local NAACP...

How Dancing Boosts Brain Cells and Lifelong Learning

Picture: Greenwich Dancing Judith Lynne Hanna - Merely art? Recreation? Dance may be the Cinderella of education. About 400 studies related to interdisciplinary 21st-century neuroscience lead to the discovery that there is a hidden value to dance education for young and old alike. Dance is a language of physical exercise that sparks new brain cells (neurogenesis) and their connections that are responsible for acquiring knowledge and thinking. Dancing makes some neurons nimble so that they readily wire into the neural network. Neural...

Diversity Report Finds Hollywood out of Touch with Audience Preferences

Picture: Quvenzhane Wallis and Halle Berry on the red carpet at the 2013 Oscar awards. Wallis played the lead role in a recent remake of the classic movie Anna Majavu - Diversity in casting is said to be “at its peak”. Industry publications, such as Deadline Hollywood, have written of a “noticeable shift” towards the casting of Black actors lately, particularly in new TV series screened all over the world such as ‘Love is a Four Letter Word’, ‘How to Get Away With Murder’, and ‘Endgame’. This is a marked difference from the way things have always been done in Hollywood and other major centres of...

Are We Entering an Age of Increased Optimism?

Glenn Ashton - “To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places - and there are so many - where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the...

Writer Eduardo Galeano, Voice of Latin America's Left, Dead at 74

Picture: Eduardo Galeano courtesy gndolfo/flickr Deidre Fulton - Award-winning Uruguayan writer and thinker Eduardo Galeano, considered a leading voice of Latin America's left, has died at 74. The world-renowned author, who had been diagnosed with lung cancer, died in Montevideo on Monday. The novelist and journalist—whose work transcended genre and who once said "all written work constitutes literature, even graffiti"—was the prolific author of books including Memory of Fire, a three-volume narrative of the history of North and...

Conclusive Study Debunks Homeopathy as Junk Medicine

Picture: The Polite Sceptic Larry Schwartz - Not too long ago, homeopathic formulas were only sold in health food stores. You might have seen them: Little blue vials with tiny little pills in them. You might have thought good things come in small packages. Then homeopathy hit the mainstream, and became available in just about every drugstore. One of its biggest selling points is the lack of side effects, the way it works naturally with your body, how clinically effective it is. The lack of side effects is true enough—because there...