It’s important to celebrate whenever social barriers are knocked down — including the one that fell this week when Mignon Clyburn became the acting chairwoman of the Federal Communications Commission. Never before has a president appointed a woman to chair the commission — not even on an interim basis. It’s not the first time Clyburn has made history. She’s also the first African-American woman to serve as an FCC commissioner. 

Chris Marker wrote in the introduction to his 1997 multimedia CD-Rom Immemory, “I claim for the image the humility and powers of a madeleine.” In that CD-Rom and in many of his other creative endeavors, Marker continued the process of memory’s cartography. He embraced a multitude of genres as mapmaking tools, the span of his work communicating the dependence of the image to its memory. He cobbled together the realities of disparate cultures, mending the breaches in time through preservation of minutia and banality. 

This is perhaps the heart of the case that the Center for Constitutional Rights brought to Judge Shira Scheindlin’s courtroom on the 15th floor of the federal courthouse in lower Manhattan. Authorities see no wrongdoing, despite the fact that over the past decade, NYPD officers have conducted nearly 4.5 million stops in a city of 8 million. Eighty-five percent of those stopped were black or Latino, meaning that many people have been stopped more than once. 

A film robs you of imagining the world of a novel as you want to, while a novel cannot as accurately capture the televisual world we now live in. Part of Gatsby’s appeal is its depiction of a time when the American dream was a promising ideal, when the U.S. was not, as Horace from Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask (2010) puts it, a “fat, demented pimp.” The Great Gatsby was written when the U.S. was on the upswing, and now that the nation is in decline, it makes sense that there will be nostalgia for the ‘good-old days’. 

May 19 marked what would have been the 88th birthday of Malcolm X.  Malcolm’s name is still revered by legions both nationally and internationally, and for good reason. A tireless, uncompromising foe of imperial wars, racism, economic exploitation and a staunch supporter of African and Third World liberation movements, Malcolm X rekindled black pride. His legacy and place in history decades after his brutal murder, a crime still shrouded in controversy and debate, are more secure than ever.

Modern realignments have altered the military landscape along with prospects of future conflicts which have shifted away from the type of heavy land battles that tanks are required for. As political and military realities shift and the historical presence of tanks as main combat tools is scaled back, the battle over the tanks has found a new frontier in Congress, concerning political posturing and defense budget cuts. 

It would be nice to see Jason Statham try something more demanding than his standard, tough-guy role. Still, he has so thoroughly perfected the part that it’s easy to enjoy his performances. In “Parker,” Statham goes back to the well, playing the title character: a professional thief with an interesting code of ethics. In an early scene, Parker says he won’t steal from people who can’t afford it, won’t hurt people who don’t deserve it and always follows through on a promise. 

For many of us-- and this includes those who haven’t dedicated the better part of our careers to Manchester’s mightiest quartet-- that feeling was first generated in 1983 with The Smiths’ debut performance on Top of the Pops. Still, this iconic appearance is one of the most discussed and dissected moments in televised music history. For Britain, it was a fittingly bold introduction to the band that would forever mold popular music.