6 d. ago Katrina: Come Hell and High Water review – Spike Lee gets straight to the defiant, joyous soul of New Orleans

The finale of the Oscar-winning director’s three-part documentary about the biggest tragedy in 21st-century Black American history is a must-watch. It’s a stirring look at the city’s refusal to lie downIt’s hard to quantify the significance of Hurricane Katrina: the combination of a historic natural disaster and cold systemic indifference towards its impoverished African American victims makes it perhaps the most significant event in 21st-century Black American history. It’s no surprise, then, that more than one major documentary series has been made to mark 20 years since wind, water and a whole lot of racism devastated New Orleans, or that leading cinematic auteurs of two consecutive generations, Spike Lee and Ryan Coogler, have each executive-produced their own.But watching Katrina: Come Hell and High Water, you do wish Lee and Coogler had got on the phone to check they weren’t doubling up too much. The new three-parter – the Lee one that arrives on Netflix to coincide with the w...

Politics

8 d. ago Among the Palms the Bomb review – the enviromental scars left behind by the US’s atom

This striking documentary is an oral history of the impact, particularly on Indigenous Americans, of 20th-century military projects in California and UtahThe culmination of a seven-year research project, Lukas Marxt and Vanja Smiljanić’s striking, exhaustive film examines the lasting impact of 20th-century military projects on the US landscape. The film begins at the former Wendover air force base in Utah, where fighter-bomber practice runs were held before the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Moving through the corridors of a museum erected to commemorate the mission, the roving camera takes in various artefacts, including replicas of the two atomic bombs, Little Boy and Fat Man. Circulating through various monitors and speakers, matter-of-fact narration of these events lingers in the air, lending an omnipresent eeriness. Here lies empty nostalgia, unnervingly entombed.The ecological devastation that surrounds the Salton Sea, a testing site for the Manhattan Project, tel...

Events

9 d. ago Trump’s attacks on the ‘Blacksonian’ have a history in a century

The United Daughters of the Confederacy set out to make slavery respectable again by promoting ‘the lost cause’It should surprise no one that former cast members from reality shows that ran for more than 15 seasons are running out of new material. Days ago, Donald Trump, former star of NBC’s The Apprentice and current US president, posted a lengthy Truth Social rant in which he (again) threatened the country’s leading cultural institutions to adhere to his political ideology. The target was one he has had in his crosshairs before – the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) – which Trump called “OUT OF CONTROL” in his post. “Everything discussed [in NMAAHC exhibits] is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was,” Trump unloaded. “WOKE IS BROKE,” he continued through his customary use of all caps and misplaced capitalization of common nouns. “We have the HOTTEST Country in the World, and we want people to talk about it, including in our M...

Politics

3 w. ago Crumbling shells, melting ice – and a wildlife boom: what recreating Scott’s Antarctic trip reveals about our seas today

A new polar expedition compared samples with those collected more than a century ago by by Scott, along with voyages led by Shackleton and BorchgrevinkThree glass specimen jars full of satsuma-sized echinoderms, or sea urchins, sit on Dr Hugh Carter’s desk in the Natural History Museum. Each one, collected from the depths of the Southern Ocean by polar teams led by Sir Ernest Shackleton, Capt Robert Falcon Scott and the Norwegian Carsten Borchgrevink, tells a tale of heroic exploration and scientific endeavour.Now, more than a century later, Carter, the Natural History Museum’s (NHM) curator of marine invertebrates, hopes the preserved Antarctic urchins, 50 in all, will help tell a different, increasingly urgent story of modern times: how changes in the world’s southernmost waters may be affecting marine life. Continue reading...

Politics

3 w. ago What recreating Scott’s Antarctic expedition reveals about our seas today

A new polar project compared samples with those collected more than a century ago by by Scott, along with voyages led by Shackleton and BorchgrevinkThree glass specimen jars full of satsuma-sized echinoderms, or sea urchins, sit on Dr Hugh Carter’s desk in the Natural History Museum. Each one, collected from the depths of the Southern Ocean by polar teams led by Sir Ernest Shackleton, Capt Robert Falcon Scott and the Norwegian Carsten Borchgrevink, tells a tale of heroic exploration and scientific endeavour.Now, more than a century later, Carter, the Natural History Museum’s (NHM) curator of marine invertebrates, hopes the preserved Antarctic urchins, 50 in all, will help tell a different, increasingly urgent story of modern times: how changes in the world’s southernmost waters may be affecting marine life. Continue reading...

Politics

4 w. ago A refreshed West London house balances its history with a series of 21st

A refreshed West London house balances its history with a series of 21st-century interventions  wallpaper.com

Culture