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Watts exploded. On August 12, at 9:30 P.M., a group identifying itself as “followers of Malcolm X” arrived on Avalon Boulevard shouting “Let’s burn . . . baby, burn!” The next day, at 3:30 P.M., the Emergency Control Center journal recorded “6 male Negroes firing rifles at helicopter from vehicle, …

Tensions between Watts residents and the police ran high. While the vast majority of Watts residents in 1965 were black, only 4 percent of the sworn personnel of the Los Angeles Police Department and 6 percent of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department were black. Police Chief William Parker us…

As I read this collection, I found myself thinking about an early debate between W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke about the possibility of a political black modernist art, a debate framed in terms of the relationship between art and propaganda. Du Bois famously declared that “all art is propaganda …

It’s easy to get lost in the weeds here and lose sight of the essential. In each of these scenarios, on each of these sad, warming planets, the Green New Deal fails because capitalism. Because, in capitalism, a small class of owners and managers, in competition with itself, finds itself forced to m…

To replace current US energy consumption with renewables, you’d need to devote at least 25–50 percent of the US landmass to solar, wind, and biofuels, according to the estimates made by Vaclav Smil, the grand doyen of energy studies. Is there room for that and expanding human habitation? For that a…