Race | Valerie Block

WORD OF MOUTH: FALL

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Posted on October 2, 2026 by Valerie Block

Engage or escape? Here are some recommendations for bizarre times.

ESCAPE:

Novel: The Novel Detective — Teresa Dovalpage

Memoir: Wild Game: My Mother, Her Secret, and Me — Adrienne Brodeur

Music: Switched on Pop — Charlie Harding and Nate Sloan

Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be: The Beach Boy: My uncanny night watching one of the legendary group’s last-ever shows.

Analog moments: 36 mechanical keyboards and switches, curated and sound-mapped — The Listening Museum

Survival of the Random, but Not Always the Fittest: Why Don’t Humans Have Tails? — Brian Klaas

Novel: The Dentist — Tim Sullivan

ENGAGE:

Law: Ketanji Brown Jackson is Getting Tired of the Supreme Court’s Shadow Docket Abuses — Madiba K. Dennie, Balls and Strikes

Elections: New Mail Voting Rules Moved Forward Despite USPS Officials’ Concerns About Mass Disenfranchisement — Jenn Fifield, ProPublica

A.I.: In Defense of the Detour: On craft, A.I. and what gets lost when we skip the slow part — Giorgia Lupi, New York Times

Race, Society, Systems, Lack of Empathy: The NYC Subway Chokehold That Divided America, with Anand Giridharadas — Stay Tuned With Preet

Viruses: Witchcraft, or Sheeppox? A 3,700-Year-Old Virus Hiding in a Medieval book Just Killed 500,000 Animals — Elizabeth Rayne, Popular Mechanics

Witchcraft, or Sheeppox? A 3,700-Year-Old Virus Hiding in a Medieval book Just Killed 500,000 Animals — Elizabeth Rayne, Popular Mechanics

Politics: The Midterm Convention: Douche-a-Palooza. Have I Got News for You. Roy Wood, Amber Ruffin, Michael Ian Black, Julia Ioffe, Jon Lovett

MLK JR: Far more radical than we remember.

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Posted on January 19, 2026 by Valerie Block

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Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think…

Too many politicians in the South recognize this disease of soft mindedness that engulfs their constituency. With insidious zeal, they make inflammatory statements and disseminate distortions and half-truths that arouse abnormal fears and morbid antipathies within the minds of uneducated and underprivileged whites, leaving them so confused that they are led to acts of meanness and violence that no normal person commits.

There is little hope for us until we become tough minded enough to break loose from the shackles of prejudice, half-truths, and ignorance. The shape of the world today does not permit us the luxury of soft-mindedness. A nation or a civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on an installment plan…

Soft-minded acquiescence is cowardly. My friends, we cannot win the respect of the white people of the South or elsewhere if we are willing to trade the future of our children for our personal safety and comfort. Moreover, we must learn that passively to accept an unjust system is to cooperate with that system, and thereby to become a participant in its evil.

From “A Tough Mind and a Tender Heart,” in STRENGTH TO LOVE, by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Word of Mouth: Really, Truly, Almost Spring

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Posted on March 4, 2024 by Valerie Block

Musical: A Sign of the Times — Lindsay Hope Pearlman, Richard J. Robin, Gabriel Barre, JoAnne M. Hunter, Joseph Church.

Extrauterine Children: The IVF Ruling Is About Who Gets to Raise Your Children — Dahlia Lithwick in SLATE.

Novel: Lady in the Lake — Laura Lippman

Podcast: The Wars in Ukraine and Gaza Have Changed. America’s Policy Hasn’t — Richard Haass on the Ezra Klein Show.

Podcast: Trump and the Age of Disinformation — Barb McQuade on Stay Tuned with Preet.

Double Standards: Israel, Gaza and Double Standards, Including Our Own — Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times.

TV: Avatar: the Last Air Bender — Albert Kim.

Movie: Shortcomings — Randall Park.

Idea: “Dobbs was never self-limiting to abortion—it was a save-the-date card for the religious right’s plan to come for the rest of our reproductive freedoms. …

This is the two-step wherein the state forces women to have babies they cannot raise, does nothing to help support them, then swoops in to seize the babies when their parents are seen as endangering them—a phenomenon that of course predominantly hurts poor women and women of color. The state also ensures that adoptions flow in the direction of more “worthy” parents, which means heterosexual and Christian parents, a regime also built into the legal framework. The list of people who cannot assert autonomy and control over their potential children has, in the course of a few weeks, now expanded from LGBTQ+ parents, single parents, poor parents, and parents of color to anyone who has started the process of IVF in Alabama.” —The IVF Ruling Is About Who Gets to Raise Your Children — Dahlia Lithwick in SLATE.

Word of Mouth: Almost Spring Edition

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Posted on February 21, 2024 by Valerie Block

Memoir: Go Back and Get It: A Memoir of Race, Inheritance, and Intergenerational Healing — Dionne Ford

Non-Fiction: Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters — Brian Klaas

Movie: American Fiction — Cord Jefferson

Movie: The Meyerowitz Stories (new and selected) — Noah Baumbach

TV: Mr and Mrs Smith — Donald Glover, Francesca Sloane

TV: Magpie Murders — Anthony Horowitz, Peter Cattaneo

Idea: “President Biden has thus far declined to impose consequences on Netanyahu for his repeated disregard of U.S. positions and interests. Ending the double standard which sets a lower bar for Israel, and requiring the mutual recognition of the right to statehood and compliance with the other Quartet Principles, would be an even-handed place to start. It is essential for the U.S. to enforce this mutual recognition, as it seeks to not merely end the current war, but set a course to finally resolve the underlying conflict, and ensure that the horrors suffered by Israelis and Palestinians never happen again.”

Both the Israeli and Palestinian governments should be obligated to recognize the other’s right to statehood— Dylan Williams in the Forward

Idea: “It’s tempting to see Navalny’s apparent murder, as some American analysts have, as a sign of weakness on the part of Putin. But a dictator’s ability to annihilate what he fears is a measure of his hold on power, as is his ability to choose the time to strike.”

The Death of Alexey Navalny, Putin’s Most Formidable Opponent — Masha Gessen in the New Yorker

WORD OF MOUTH: Mid-Winter

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Posted on January 29, 2024 by Valerie Block

NONFICTION: DOPPELGANGER: A Trip into the Mirror World — Naomi Klein

YES! A Handy Manual for Republicans Commenting on Mass Shootings — Jamie Raskin

TV: Schmigadoon! Season 2 — Ken Daurio, Cinco Paul

TV: The Brothers Sun —Brad Falchuk, Amy Wang, Brian Wu

MOVIE: The Woman King — Gina Prince-Bythewood

PODCAST: “Chaos Theory Explains It.” Brian Klaas, author of Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters, on the Brian Lehrer Show.

SPIRITUAL REWIRING: Train Yourself to Always Show Up — Rabbi Sharon Brous

IDEA: “The spread of lies and conspiracies online is now so rampant that it threatens public health and, quite possibly, the survival of representative democracy. The solution to this informational crisis, however, is not to look to tech oligarchs to disappear people we don’t like; it’s to get serious about demanding an information commons that can be counted upon as a basic civic right.” — Naomi Klein

IDEA: “It’s time to pass the universal background check and restore the expired ban on military-style assault rifles, which was constitutional and effective. Weapons of war are unnecessary for hunting, recreation or self-defense in the home, which are the purposes of individual gun ownership outside of military service protected by the Second Amendment.” — Jamie Raskin