Nuanced

Michael Donkor, 39, was born in London to Ghanaian parents. His first novel, Hold (2018), about three teenage girls, was listed for the Dylan Thomas prize and the Desmond Elliott prize. His second, Grow Where They Fall, follows Kwame, a secondary school teacher, which was Donkor’s own job until his recent move to Lisbon, where he now works as a bookseller.Where did this book begin?I’d had some experiences – some challenging, some comic – of being in incredibly white environments, and I wondered whether a novel might be a…

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Young men are more likely than older men to think that feminism has done more harm than good, according to a new survey, suggesting a backward step in attitudes to gender equality. Young women aged 16-29 are also slightly more likely than women aged 30–59 to say that feminism has done more harm than good. The survey,…

‘Muscle worship, domination, same-old same-old.” ​​Tischa “The Tigress” Thomas is describing a recent session with a client, who pays for the privilege of submitting to her will. Thomas’s main gig is bodybuilding, but like many semi-professionals in the world of sports entertainment and performance, she engages in various side-hustles to make ends meet. One of the strengths of Philipp Fussenegger’s documentary portrait of her is that it is not wholly a feelgood story of uplifting empowerment, nor is it a relentlessly grim…

Our youth are in a mental health crisis. Young people describe steadily increasing sadness, hopelessness and suicidal thoughts. These mental health challenges are greater for youth who hold marginalized identities that include sexual orientation, gender identity or race or ethnicity. Near-constant exposure to traumatizing media and news stories, such as when Black youth watch videos of people who look like them being killed or when transgender youth hear multiple politicians endorse and pass laws that deny their very…

Human beings surviving (or otherwise) in extreme situations is a recurring area of fascination for the American journalist and author David Grann. A virtuoso storyteller with a talent for archival research, he has tracked explorers through mosquito-ridden Amazonian swamps in The Lost City of Z, and across the howling wastes of Antarctica in The White Darkness, an outing that involved frostbite, broken teeth, bacterial peritonitis and eventually death.Now he’s taken to the high seas with The Wager – and you can see why…

Two years after its release, narrative roguelike Road 96 still sticks in my memory. The road-trip drama follows a cast of kids attempting to escape an authoritarian government by hitchhiking across their country’s border. It’s a tense series of vignettes where wrong choices result in shocking teen deaths, a political slasher film where the killer is unchecked fascism. While some of its commentary was left a bit underexplored, it delivered an unmistakable message about youths fighting oppressive power systems. Its new…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeHalle Bailey has promised that her take on Ariel will be more “nuanced” than the animated version in 1989’s The Little Mermaid.The Disney-produced live-action remake of the classic musical fantasy is set to arrive in just two months.The story follows Ariel – a teenage mermaid princess who dreams of becoming human and falls in love with a human prince named Eric.In a new interview with…

A new framework for studying the intersection of climate anomalies and social conflicts finds a strong link between temperature fluctuations and aggregated global conflicts, says research co-written Ujjal Kumar Mukherjee, a professor of business administration at the Gies College of Business at Illinois. Credit: L. Brian Stauffer A new framework for studying the intersection of climate anomalies and social conflicts finds a…

At first glance there is something forcibly piteous about the title of Colin Grant’s book, I’m Black So You Don’t Have to Be. It reads as though there is something inherently burdensome about being Black. It isn’t until you read the full quote – “I’m black so you can do all of those white things. I’m black so you don’t have to be” – which comes from his sometime mentor and “ribald philosopher” Uncle Castus, that you understand it is not meant as a display of martyrdom, but rather an insult. It’s a jab at the privileges of…

Five Profiles of Attitudinal responses to Ambivalence and their Marginal Means of SNS Use Patterns (z-scores for ease of comparison). Credit: Information Systems Journal (2022). DOI: 10.1111/isj.12407 What's your relationship status with social media? I love it.I hate it.It's complicated! Social media will always draw from a base…