For T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Emily J. Lordi writes about the Black psychedelic movement in music, architecture, film, and art. “Like many countercultural movements,” Lordi writes, “white psychedelia looked to people of color, whose cultures seemed to form the marginalized counter to the mainstream culture, for visions of an alternative life.” Black psychedelia has also rarely been heralded as such due to critical interest in Afrofuturism, whose adherents look to “future worlds or outer space” rather than “the present, the earthly plane.” Among the questions posed by Black psychedelic art are: “What is Black Power? What is the Black community?”
In her New Yorker review of Sheila Heti’s new novel, Pure Colour, Parul Sehgal tracks the novel’s interest in criticism: “Do we really ‘murder to dissect,’ as Wordsworth held? What harm do I commit if I step away from my bearish defense of Heti and, in an avian cast of mind, survey the novel’s inconsistencies, the muddled cosmology that governs its world?”
In Vulture, Jackson McHenry looks at the set design of the Netflix show Inventing Anna, which largely takes place at a fictionalized New York magazine office. The set designer Henry Dunn explains, “ If there was something that looked realistically grimy at a magazine office, we glitzed it up.”
The Paris Review has posted a previously unpublished story by Cookie Mueller, the John Waters film star and downtown New York It Girl in the 1980s. The work, “Narcotics,” is from a new edition of Mueller’s Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, which will be published by Semiotext(e) in April.
At Jewish Currents, Mari Cohen and Alex Kane examine the responses of Zionist organizations to a major Amnesty International report on Israel/Palestine. Many liberal Zionist groups agree with the report’s characterization of the situation in Israel/Palestine but take issue with it being described as “apartheid.” Joy Hill, a member of J Street, disagrees with the organization’s “strategic calculation” to oppose the word. “The more ‘moderate,’ ‘legitimate’ sources that use it, the easier it’s going to be to move the government to be accountable,” she told Jewish Currents.