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Saturday, June 12, 2021

The Rise And Fall Of Planet Hollywood, by Kate Storey, Esquire

For a few years in the nineties, these stars dropped any pretense of hauteur, while everyone else succumbed to their love of celebrity by paying ten dollars to eat a burger under the Terminator’s leather jacket. Cheesy? Yes. A massive—but fleeting—success unlike anything before it? A resounding yes.

By the start of the next decade, the enterprise would collapse, falling into bankruptcy twice, and the bold-faced names who reveled there would begin to walk away. Today, there’s a tendency among the stars involved to be overcome with sudden amnesia. It seems they’d rather we all just forget about the whole thing.

What's It Like Inside An ER? This Doctor And Author Shares Raw, Honest Stories, by Heather John Fogarty, Los Angeles Times

Touching on themes of race and gender, Harper gives voice and humanity to patients who are marginalized and offers poignant insight into the daily sacrifices and heroism of medical workers.

The Curious Case Of “Herlock Sholmès”, by Matthew Dessem, Slate

The short answer is copyright law, but the long answer is much funnier.

Why Doesn’t Philosophy Progress From Debate To Consensus?, by Chris Daly, Aeon

Yet, despite this wealth of questions and the centuries spent tackling them, philosophers haven’t successfully provided any answers. They’ve tried long and hard but nothing they’ve said towards answering those questions has quite made the grade. Other philosophers haven’t been slow to pick holes in their attempted answers and expose flaws or dubious assumptions in them. The punctures in the attempted answers then get patched up and put up for discussion again. But what happens is that new punctures appear, or the patches fail and the old punctures are revealed again. Philosophy emerges as a series of arguments without end, and its questions settle into seemingly intractable problems.

I Had To Travel 6,000 Miles To Learn This Lesson About Being Asian American, by Jean Trinh, Los Angeles Times

It took traveling more than 6,000 miles, and the kindness of my extended family, to underline the lesson I’ve been learning bit by bit for decades: There are no rules to being Asian American.

Book Review: "Refugee: A Memoir" - A Powerful Story Of The Plight Of Millions, by David Mehegan, The Arts Fuse

The dusty or sodden roads and heaving seas are full of desperate pilgrims, carrying small children or old people and what they can carry, pushing wheelchairs or market baskets from the southern hemisphere, looking for shelter and hope in the developed parts of the world. We see their forlorn faces on the nightly news, lined up in flashlight at our own border by the Border Patrol, or bodies packed shoulder to shoulder in Zodiac-type rafts supplied by traffickers at the cost of the migrants’ last pennies — all too often pathetically overturned — on the Mediterranean Sea.

We seldom read their complete stories in their own words, except in brief answers to journalists’ questions on rescue ships or in refugee camps. Thus the value of Congolese activist Emmanuel Mbolela’s comprehensive 2014 account, Refugee: A Memoir, originally published in German and now (with some updating) in English.

There Was A Cultural Shift In 1974, And Los Angeles Played A Starring Role, by Louis P. Masur, Washington Post

It is easy to think of transformative years. Some are obvious: 1776, 1861, 1914, 2001, last year. Others are notable, but do not immediately leap to mind: 1831 (I wrote a book about that year), 1877, 1968, 1989. Ronald Brownstein, a senior editor at the Atlantic and political analyst for CNN, offers 1974 as a pivotal year in which Los Angeles took center stage as a cultural broker and “transformed movies, music, television, and politics.”