Brittany K. Allen

A well lived and long life. RIP

One Fetish After Another: PTA Exploits Black Women and Averts Revolution Paul Thomas Anderson's action flick leaves much to be desired.

blackgirlwatching.substack.com/p/one-battle...

One Fetish After Another: PTA Exploits Black Women and Averts Revolution

Home - Table of Success Eric Adams has said that “all my haters become my waiters when I sit down at the table of success.” The haters are no longer waiters—on Wednesday, September 25, amidst widening investigations into his...

The Haters won. But the Table of Success is forever. tableofsuccess.hellgatenyc.com

Assata Shakur, of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army, has died at the age of 78 in Cuba, where she received political asylum in 1984.

I have! Left with a lot of the same feelings!

a man and a woman walking down a sidewalk with #one battle after another written on the bottom ALT: a man and a woman walking down a sidewalk with #one battle after another written on the bottom

One Battle After Another has definitely got some things going for it (it's wildly entertaining and the performances are top-notch). But it also makes clear why Anderson rarely centers Black women in his films. The white male characters portrayed by DiCaprio and Penn are more prominent, realized...

Thank you for THIS take! I've been waiting for it!!!

attn: Black feminist critics; sorry to be ~that bish~ but I desperately need your takes on the new PTA 😂

Why are we so obsessed (lately) with TV shows about dying media? On Peacock, a new sitcom about a flatlining local paper is attempting to draw eyeballs back to the newsroom. (Of all places!) And last Monday, The Studio, an inside Hollywood baseball game, swept t…

waxed on (and off) for @literaryhub.bsky.social about our current tv obsession with dead/dying media 👀

I know correlation isn’t causation, and I know numbers this small are anecdotes not data, but Redford, like Lynch, certainly does provide evidence towards the notion that trying to do good in your life might be related to continuing to get hotter right up until the day you pass from this earth

screenshot of the post: "I thought my capacity for shock had been completely lost. But I have to admit, reading this message, which went out this morning to all public employees of the State of Virginia, stunned me: "Good morning, State Colleagues: Many of you saw the Proclamation issued by the Governor last night asking Virginians to pause at noon today to reflect and pray for Charlie Kirk’s family, to reject all forms of violence, and for our Commonwealth and Nation to stand together. (You may find the Official Proclamation here.) Just as our Nation joined together after September 11th, so too must we make a similar and lasting commitment to defeat the evils that harm our democracy." Over the years, I've read countless articles and books about the Redemption period after Reconstruction, how previously reviled and odious figures—slave masters, Confederate politicians, southern generals—were canonized by, first, the white South and ultimately the white power elite of the nation as a whole. I suddenly have such a visceral sense of what it must have felt like to be a formerly enslaved person, an abolitionist, a Union soldier, the families of Union soldiers who lost their sons or husbands or brothers, a radical founder of the Republican Party, to see this happening. It's stupefying, shocking, as I said, to see a version of it now, in real time, right before my eyes. It's like I'm seeing Birth of a Nation getting made right in front of me. After 9/11, Susan Sontag pleaded to a nation that had completely lost its mind, its sense of reality and proportion, any and every sense of history at all, "let's not be stupid together." I know it's a lot to ask of this country, but, please, let's not be stupid together."

from Corey Robin on FB:

My high school English syllabus, ranked. Fall is in the air, which means millions of American teenagers are sailing into English class. Stakes are high. Will the syllabus plant a life-long love of literature? Or simply send everyone runni…

In honor of the season, @britt-kathryn.bsky.social ranks some beloved (and not so beloved) books from her high school English syllabus.

if I had my cultural drothers/were a magician with (very) limited powers, R.E.M. would be reuniting for a one-night retrospective at the Kings Theatre THIS afternoon, and there would be a new Tessa Hadley novel in my mailbox

From Famine in Gaza to Trump Cutting SNAP, Child Hunger is An American Pastime "At home and abroad, the U.S. government is participating in starving people, particularly children, and calling it policy."

For @teenvogue.com, I wrote about America’s favorite bipartisan pastime: starving people at home and abroad. As officials confirm what we already know, that there is a famine in Gaza, I hope we can all remember that none of this is unavoidable. It is a choice.

The Lit Hub Podcast Slows Down With Some Nice Things A weekly behind-the-scenes dive into everything interesting, dynamic, strange, and wonderful happening in literary culture—featuring Lit Hub staff, columnists, and special guests! Hosted by Drew Br…

This week, the Lit Hub Podcast features @britt-kathryn.bsky.social, @drewsof.bsky.social, Fiction/Non/Fiction, and a phone call from @maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social!

PSA/private select: it is currently possible to stream all of MTV's Unplugged on a certain corporate service that starts with a P.

time the revelator, spite the motivator 😈

Rejected pitches for The Devil Wears Prada 2. A year ago, I walked into Hollywood with the following hand of brilliant ideas. While I thought my meeting with 20th Century Studios went well, I never heard back. I was disappointed, sure. But suc…

Maybe someday we’ll get The Devil Wears Prada 2: Back in the Habit. Until then, @britt-kathryn.bsky.social shares some rejected ideas for a much-anticipated sequel.

Rejected pitches for The Devil Wears Prada 2. A year ago, I walked into Hollywood with the following hand of brilliant ideas. While I thought my meeting with 20th Century Studios went well, I never heard back. I was disappointed, sure. But suc…

today I chose silly

Just called my reps - Goldman, Gillbrand & Schumer - to tell them their silence about the murder-by-starvation of children and civilians in Gaza shocks the conscience and they must immediately call for the end of US aid to Israel until Israel institutes a ceasefire and allows aid/food to enter Gaza.

a scholar with high standing in his field, should be "counterbalanced" by a columnist notorious for his incendiary, click-mongering, and manifestly ideological takes. And this is before we address the perversity of treating the legal designation of genocide as something to debate in the Opinion section. (Alt text continued in reply)

I truly intended this just as an email and not a public thing but fuck it we ball. The New York Times is not alone in its culpability but it is deeply culpable and its near-monopoly status in our blighted American media ecosystem allows it to do what it does.

Black authors’ houses are historically hard to preserve. Here’s why (plus, a few to visit). In a recent report for The Guardian, the author Nneka M. Okona described the pull of historic literary sites. “I wanted to see more homes of the Black literary forefathers and foremothers, th…

@britt-kathryn.bsky.social explores the difficulties in saving the historical homes of Black authors (and highlights some well-preserved ones you should visit).

A Literary History of the Billionaire: Villain or Buffoon… Or Both? Lots of ink has been spilt over the billionaire. He is ruining the planet. The government. Your specific life as an under- or unemployed worker. Less important but still annoying, he may be ruining…

wrote about some fictional billionaires for @literaryhub.bsky.social ! 🤑

New TV Novels | Lisa Borst It’s a literature of dimming stars, smoggy drives through flammable chaparral, frequent benders, prostitutes. Flash periods of productivity where somebody bangs out a script in a week. There’s at leas...

boop boop, I dug this dig into tv novels/novels made for tv !

a place to start

go.bsky.app/2Fq4P6e

lifetime terms barely made sense when sneezing three times in a day came with a 70% mortality rate. we cannot be ruled by these wretched old wizards

Why are we so obsessed with stories about a group of friends in the big city? The “friends in the city” yarn has a long lineage, spanning every time-bound medium I can think of. Its classic structure follows three to five pals out of a fiercely bonded adolescence…

For @literaryhub.bsky.social, waxed a bit about one of my favorite fictional sub-genres: the Friends In the Big City story

Wow, mismanagement of New York City - what a genuinely terrifying prospect! Siri who is the current mayor of New York City

screenshot of a Facebook post by Corey Robin, which says: "By the way, did you all notice how Zohran made affordability a central issue of his campaign without selling out trans kids or shitting on immigrants? Might be some lessons there. Just a thought."

he's right and he's right to say it

Reuters photo of Zohran Mamdani onstage, with his mom looking up at him lovingly and squeezing his cheek.

Incredible mom energy from Mira Nair