Link Salad, the Outside-the-Room Edition
-- The Origin Story of DJ Khaled - Ryan Pfeffer, Miami New Times, Jan. 26, 2016
"The year was 1993. Khaled was skinnier, but not skinny. Baggy clothes hid a lumpy frame, and his eyes, coffee black, looked slightly melted, microwaved until just warm."
-- How Chris Jackson Is Building a Black Literary Movement - Vinson Cunningham, New York Times Magazine, Feb. 2, 2016
"The litany helped clarify the stakes for Jackson’s work. It is undeniable that the rise of the so-called meritocratic elite has cleared the way for certain exceptional members of recently oppressed minorities to operate, and sometimes even succeed, at the highest levels of American society. What it has so far failed to deliver - what it was never, perhaps, quite engineered to ensure - is a full sense of arrival. Of belonging. And in this country whose heart has always been moved, perhaps inordinately so, by a phrase nicely turned, it might just be that art - argumentative, confrontational art; art obsessed with a fair hearing of the truth - is the vessel through which this hope might be realized."
-- ‘I was terribly wrong’ - writers look back at the Arab spring five years on - Robin Yassin-Kassab, Alaa Abd El Fattah, Ahdaf Soueif, Mourid Barghouti, Laila Lalami, Raja Shehadeh, Khaled Mattawa, Tamim al-Barghouti, Nouri Gana, Joumana Haddad, The Guardian, Jan. 23, 2016
"Taking several shortcuts through bumpy side roads, we finally make it to the Al-Noor elementary school. We stand in a parking area that has huge engine oil-stains waiting for the children to clear out. At 1pm, Al-Noor becomes the University of Benghazi’s College of Engineering. Inside, young men and women gather in groups chatting and sipping macchiatos as they wait for class. We hear a warplane flying over, and the students tell me that the explosions are probably from the Al-Sabri and Souk al-Hout front."
"The year was 1993. Khaled was skinnier, but not skinny. Baggy clothes hid a lumpy frame, and his eyes, coffee black, looked slightly melted, microwaved until just warm."
-- How Chris Jackson Is Building a Black Literary Movement - Vinson Cunningham, New York Times Magazine, Feb. 2, 2016
"The litany helped clarify the stakes for Jackson’s work. It is undeniable that the rise of the so-called meritocratic elite has cleared the way for certain exceptional members of recently oppressed minorities to operate, and sometimes even succeed, at the highest levels of American society. What it has so far failed to deliver - what it was never, perhaps, quite engineered to ensure - is a full sense of arrival. Of belonging. And in this country whose heart has always been moved, perhaps inordinately so, by a phrase nicely turned, it might just be that art - argumentative, confrontational art; art obsessed with a fair hearing of the truth - is the vessel through which this hope might be realized."
-- ‘I was terribly wrong’ - writers look back at the Arab spring five years on - Robin Yassin-Kassab, Alaa Abd El Fattah, Ahdaf Soueif, Mourid Barghouti, Laila Lalami, Raja Shehadeh, Khaled Mattawa, Tamim al-Barghouti, Nouri Gana, Joumana Haddad, The Guardian, Jan. 23, 2016
"Taking several shortcuts through bumpy side roads, we finally make it to the Al-Noor elementary school. We stand in a parking area that has huge engine oil-stains waiting for the children to clear out. At 1pm, Al-Noor becomes the University of Benghazi’s College of Engineering. Inside, young men and women gather in groups chatting and sipping macchiatos as they wait for class. We hear a warplane flying over, and the students tell me that the explosions are probably from the Al-Sabri and Souk al-Hout front."