Emma Gonzalez's Speech about the Parkland School Massacre

when a 17 year old burns down D.C. gun politics.

What Explains U.S. Mass Shootings?

We discussed this briefly in Thursday lecture in the wake of the latest mass killings at a US school, this time 17 in Florida.  The answer to the question is in the chart.  Check out the whole article--where the chart has labels--including the brutal last line.

28 Films for Black History Month

The New York Times has an excellent list. The most obviously relevant to our course are Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970) and Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), a remake of Walter Mosley's first Easy Rawlins novel (I'll be showing clips in lecture).  But they're all relevant to Noir Cause 4 that we'll be discussing - Legacies of Slavery. I once watched House Party and Daughters of the Dust back to back--there's a wide range of great stuff here.

New York Times Pieces on Two Major National Sexual Assault Stories

There's another piece in the Havey Weinstein saga of sexual harassment and assault over many decades--Uma Thurman's much-anticipated story.  Her comments at the end are especially interesting.  So is her story about Quentin Tarantino forcing her to drive in a car crash in Kill Bill.  It might seem that she was relatively unscathed by Weinstein (and Tarantino), given her very successful career. This column makes clear that this is not the case.

The NY Times has also investigated the FBI inquiry into Dr. Larry Nasser's assaults under cover of medical treatment of teenaged and pre-teen female athletes. Notice the way the key "clue" appears here--not to mention the apparent problems with how the FBI handled the cases.   There are lots of overlaps with the course discussion of Cause 2 of noir culture that we started on Thursday.