Sixteen years since the last Matrix film, Warner Bros. announced Tuesday that Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss will reprise their iconic roles as Neo and Trinity in a fourth installment of the series. Co-creator Lana Wachowski is set to write, direct, and produce the upcoming sequel.

“We could not be more excited to be re-entering The Matrix with Lana,” said Toby Emmerich, chairman of Warner Bros, in a press release, calling Wachowski “a true visionary—a singular and original creative filmmaker.”

To watch The Handmaid’s Tale this week, or Showtime’s The Loudest Voice—in which Russell Crowe’s Roger Ailes was seemingly enabled in his alleged sexual harassment and abuse by his assistant Judy Laterza—was to see echoes of a recurring theme that keeps playing out in the news cycle. Laterza, according to accounts by the journalist Gabriel Sherman, approached pretty young interns and invited them to meet her boss. Maxwell allegedly functioned as a madam for Epstein, finding him a steady flow of girls. Harvey Weinstein was reportedly able to compel actresses to attend meetings in his hotel room because he had female assistants take them upstairs.

No system of female oppression can function, it seems, without women being complicit in it.

The 2016 election, in which 53 percent of white women opted to vote for a man who has bragged about assaulting women, showed that many women will prioritize their assumed economic security over the well-being of others. On the simplest level, money and power can act as powerful motivators. Before Maxwell met Epstein, she’d suffered a decline in her own fortunes when her father, the media tycoon Robert Maxwell, drowned in 1991 after falling from his yacht, Lady Ghislaine, off the coast of the Canary Islands. After his death, it emerged that Maxwell had plundered hundreds of millions of pounds from his company’s pension funds. His daughter was left with nothing but a personal trust granting her £80,000 a year. She fled to New York, leaving 32,000 of her father’s employees to deal with the emptying out he’d done of their retirement accounts.

Maxwell’s indefinable relationship with Epstein seemed to restore her financial and social capital—he apparently bought her a 7,000-square-foot townhouse on the Upper East Side, while his wealth renewed her access to socialites, playboys, and princes. But Epstein also seems to have had a hold on Maxwell that transcended status. She believed, according to reports in Vanity Fair, that if she did enough to please him, he would marry her. Maxwell allegedly had intimate knowledge of Epstein’s predilections for girls and young women, and yet she appears to have hero-worshipped him anyway. She saw the girls she recruited for him, according to Vanity Fair, not as vulnerable teenagers, but as inconvenient obstacles to her ultimate goal, describing them as “nothing” and “trash.”

The truth is that, in the end, such purported betrayal of other women’s trust seems to have its cost. Laterza lost her $2-million-a-year salary after Ailes was fired, and for her years of loyal service, he left her the relatively paltry sum of $30,000 in his will, from an estate totaling more than $100 million. Maxwell is the target of a new lawsuit accusing her of enabling Epstein’s abuse.

My mourning mind, compromised and searching for coincidence, processes the age Toni Morrison was when she died, eighty-eight, as two infinity signs, straightened and snatched right-side up. If we are Morrison-fearing, as some others are with their icons, well, we were socialized by her novels. What an experience, to be mothered on one plane by our Beloved. It’s a plane that occupies the thorny reserve of memory. One thing about being a black girl is, by the time you come around, and your body awakens to feeling historically out of sorts, the matriarchs have been worn out. Their patience to “do language” has dried up. You have been born late to the mystery. Catch up, but how? Morrison motioned to us and got us up to date.

For years, it went on like this: I would become withdrawn, and my mother would hand me “Sula,” then “Jazz,” then “Beloved.” My early readings of the novels were hungry misuses. Her novels were the boundary between herself and her readers, an instrument of intellectual self-protection, but we violated the boundary, almost deliriously. By the time I was reading Morrison, the novel had allegedly lost its status as an influential factor in the making of society. We didn’t know that. Morrison was our celebrity; it was only right that she appear on “Oprah.” We were poor in imagination, trained to think of our histories as sociological math. Morrison invalidated the lie, which taints black minds especially, that our people are either one way or the other. To her, we were naturally literary and epic. I got inebriated on the image of Pecola Breedlove, who “was a long time with the milk,” soused by a community’s predilection for a certain kind of beauty. The ghost in “Beloved,” swelling as she threatened to overcome the spiteful home at 124 Bluestone Road, made us think gothically. I wanted to build a retreat in the woods, like Denver. I thought that I was destined, one day, to become a Sula Peace, leaving home, and returning under the shelter of a great hat, carting havoc just under my breast.

In a foreword to “Sula,” Morrison wrote, “Outlaw women are fascinating—not always for their behavior, but because historically women are seen as naturally disruptive and their status is an illegal one from birth if it is not under the rule of men.” It is too seldom acknowledged that the greatest novelist this country has ever produced was a single black mother. She had two sons, one who passed before she did, and how many daughters? We know that it is problematic, or maybe just self-indulgent, to claim her as mother. And yet, if the business of mothering is to broker the link between two generations, then what else can she be?

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/toni-morrison-and-what-our-mothers-couldnt-say?mbid=social_twitter&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_brand=tny

In the 1890's, the Republican Party of Virginia faced considerable challenges.

The Walton Act helped to keep political control in the hands of the Democratic party, by discouraging many Republican and African American voters from visiting the polls. Democrats also tried to alienate Republicans from white voters by stigmatizing them as the "party of the Negro." On November 9, 1898, The Daily Progress commented on the effects of Virginia's one-party system on the 1898 election results, in "A Quiet Day Everywhere and a Small Vote." The election was marked by voter apathy.

In an attempt to regain voter support, the Republican party urged local voters to form campaigning clubs in their ward or precinct. Despite continual African-American support, the Republican party increased efforts to recover white votes through a "lily white" movement. The Republican party proclaimed that it was a white man's party and had no room to accommodate African Americans. In "WILL IT WORK," published August 13, 1900, The Daily Progress questioned the feasibility and fairness of excluding African Americans from the Republican Party.

The African-American Republican leaders felt the full effects of the "lily white" movement when they, along with their delegation, were barred from the Republican Congressional Convention held at Luray in July, 1922. Charlottesville sent two delegations to this convention. One, led by R.N. Flannagan (President of the Henry Anderson Independent Club), was all white. The other, led by City Chairman L.W. Cox, included four African Americans. The convention decided to dismiss the Cox delegation and seat the "lily-white" faction of Charlottesville's Republicans.

Late on a winter night, Aretha Franklin sat in the dressing room of Caesars Windsor Hotel and Casino, in Ontario. She did not wear the expression of someone who has just brought boundless joy to a few thousand souls.

“What was with the sound?” she said, in a tone somewhere between perplexity and irritation. Feedback had pierced a verse of “My Funny Valentine,” and before she sat down at the piano to play “Inseparable,” a tribute to the late Natalie Cole, she narrowed her gaze and called on a “Mr. Lowery” to fix the levels once and for all. Miss Franklin, as nearly everyone in her circle tends to call her, was distinctly, if politely, displeased. “For a time up there, I just couldn’t hear myself right,” she said.

On the counter in front of her, next to her makeup mirror and hairbrush, were small stacks of hundred-dollar bills. She collects on the spot or she does not sing. The cash goes into her handbag and the handbag either stays with her security team or goes out onstage and resides, within eyeshot, on the piano. “It’s the era she grew up in—she saw so many people, like Ray Charles and B. B. King, get ripped off,” a close friend, the television host and author Tavis Smiley, told me. “There is the sense in her very often that people are out to harm you. And she won’t have it. You are not going to disrespect her.”

Franklin has won eighteen Grammy awards, sold tens of millions of records, and is generally acknowledged to be the greatest singer in the history of postwar popular music. James Brown, Sam Cooke, Etta James, Otis Redding, Ray Charles: even they cannot match her power, her range from gospel to jazz, R. & B., and pop. At the 1998 Grammys, Luciano Pavarotti called in sick with a sore throat and Aretha, with twenty minutes’ notice, sang “Nessun dorma” for him. What distinguishes her is not merely the breadth of her catalogue or the cataract force of her vocal instrument; it’s her musical intelligence, her way of singing behind the beat, of spraying a wash of notes over a single word or syllable, of constructing, moment by moment, the emotional power of a three-minute song. “Respect” is as precise an artifact as a Ming vase.

“There are certain women singers who possess, beyond all the boundaries of our admiration for their art, an uncanny power to evoke our love,” Ralph Ellison wrote in a 1958 essay on Mahalia Jackson. “Indeed, we feel that if the idea of aristocracy is more than mere class conceit, then these surely are our natural queens.” In 1967, at the Regal Theatre, in Chicago, the d.j. Pervis Spann presided over a coronation in which he placed a crown on Franklin’s head and pronounced her the Queen of Soul.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/04/04/aretha-franklins-american-soul?mbid=social_twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_social-type=owned&utm_brand=tny

The Fourth of July in 1776 is regarded by most Americans as the country’s birthday. But what if we were to tell you that the country’s true birth date, the moment that its defining contradictions first came into the world, was in late August 1619?

That was when a ship arrived at Point Comfort in the British colony of Virginia, bearing a cargo of 20 to 30 enslaved Africans. Their arrival inaugurated a barbaric system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years and form the basis for almost every aspect of American life. The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times memorializing that event on its 400th anniversary. The goal of the project is to deepen understanding of American history (and the American present) by proposing a new point of origin for our national story. In the days and weeks to come, we will publish essays demonstrating that nearly everything that has made America exceptional grew out of slavery.

Join us for an evening of conversation and performance, streamed below, featuring Nikole Hannah-Jones, Jamelle Bouie, Mary Elliot, Eve Ewing, Tyehimba Jess, Yusef Komunyakaa, Wesley Morris, Jake Silverstein and Linda Villarosa.

Remember to look out for our “1619 Project” on August 18 which examines how the legacy of slavery continues to shape and define life in the United States. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/13/magazine/1619-project-livestream.html

High school best friends and science prodigies C.J. and Sebastian spend every spare minute working on their latest homemade invention: backpacks that enable time travel. But when C.J.’s older brother Calvin dies after an encounter with police officers, the young duo decide to put their unfinished tech to use in a desperate bid to save Calvin. From director Stefon Bristol and producer Spike Lee comes See You Yesterday, a sci-fi adventure grounded in familial love, cultural divides and the universal urge to change the wrongs of the past.

Countless nights of creative problem solving have brought longtime friends and scientists NATE, BERNARD, and CHLOE as far as they've come. Collaborating from Nate's ramshackle garage, the trio has blazed a trail to the frontier of Artificial Intelligence - to KATE, a self-aware AI designed to behave like a human, contained to and tested within the safety of a computer program that interfaces with the real world via bootstrapped virtual reality technology.

When Kate fails a key experiment, Bernard and Chloe insist they shut her down and go back to the drawing board, but Kate has other plans.