Fiona Hill has studied the words and actions of Vladimir Putin for years as a Russia expert on the National Security Council. Since Trump fired her, she has been at the Brookings Institurion and is free to speak in public.

I think you will find this interview in Foreign Policy interesting.

She thinks Putin is playing mind games with the West.

What a liar he is. He just signed a “historic” deal with Ukraine to allow Ukrainian wheat to reach global markets and ease world hunger. One day later, Russian missiles struck the port of Odessa, where the grain was supposed to be shipped out.

“Broadly speaking, the ‘Space Race’ of the 1950s and 60s involved two major players, the United States and the Soviet Union. But there were also minor players: take, for instance, the Zambian Space Program, founded and administered by just one man. A Time magazine article published in November 1964 — when the Republic of Zambia was one week old — described Edward Mukuka Nkoloso as a ‘grade-school science teacher and the director of Zambia’s National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy.’ Nkoloso had a plan ‘to beat the U.S. and the Soviet Union to the moon. Already Nkoloso is training twelve Zambian astronauts, including a 16-year-old girl, by spinning them around a tree in an oil drum and teaching them to walk on their hands, the only way humans can walk on the moon.’ Nkoloso and his Quixotic space program seem to have drawn as much attention as…

“In John Cassavetes’s Husbands, the director, Ben Gazzara, and Peter Falk play Gus, Harry, and Archie, three middle-aged, middle-class suburbanites who come together at the funeral of their close mutual friend Stuart, and, united in grief, commence drinking together. And then . . . they keep drinking. When the sun has risen, they careen around New York avoiding their families and careers, and when responsibilities threaten to catch up to them, they hop a flight to London so that their full focus can remain on the only thing that matters: one another. The longer the movie goes on—and it seems to be composed of small eternities—the more it hurts. And like all the best of Cassavetes’s work, it feels as if every frame hums with astonishing life. No image or sound is ever employed just to convey information. Always, overwhelmingly, feeling. Posthumously canonized as the patron saint of American independent…

February 1969: Pete O’Neal talks about the formation of the Kansas City chapter of the Black Panther Party.

“Charlotte Hill O’Neal is known by several names. Residents of the Arusha region of northern Tanzania, where she has lived for decades, call her Mama C as Charlotte is difficult for Tanzanians to pronounce. Others call her Mama Africa because of the scarification on her cheeks and the ring piercing her nose, and because she encourages the local youth to be proud of their culture and heritage. Her Orisha spiritual name is Osotunde Fasuyi. She was initiated several years ago as a priestess in the Yoruba belief system, which originated about 10 000 years ago in present-day Nigeria. Enslaved Africans brought it to the Americas and the Caribbean, where it syncretised with other belief systems and is now practised throughout these areas. Charlotte is bedecked in jewellery and beads. Some items represent…

“Robert Creeley’s ‘I Know a Man’ is in many ways a signature poem. Few poems we choose to discuss on PoemTalk are such. Many are downright unrepresentative. This one might indeed be unrepresentative but if a person knows just one Creeley poem this is probably it. It’s been much written about. InThe San Francisco RenaissanceMichael Davidson explores the ‘Beat ethos’ with a detailed reading of ‘I Know a Man.’ Similarly, PoemTalkers Randall Couch, Jessica Lowenthal and Bob Perelman find beat here — but also its counterargument, and/or a rejoinder to its dark depth and to the beat propensity for driving nowhere (or somewhere) fast. Robert Kern in boundary 2 — a 1978 essay — finds postmodern poetics in the Creeleyite anthem: in a nutshell, composition as recognition. Cid Corman (himself the topic of an upcoming PoemTalk) finds and commends the ‘basic English’ of the poem, comparing it…

“The city’s Parks Department opened a new photography exhibition at Central Park’s Arsenal Gallery that displays more than 40 archived photographs from the department’s collection. Called ‘Streets In Play: Katrina Thomas, NYC Summer 1968,’ the exhibit features images taken by the late photographer Katrina Thomas, who in 1968 was hired by NYC Mayor John Lindsay and tasked with capturing the city’s summer initiative, ‘Playstreets,’ in which residential blocks were closed to vehicles and instead equipped for recreational activity. Lindsay originally commissioned the photos for publicity, and to show proof that the city had been ‘compensating for a lack of investment in low-income, racially segregated neighborhoods,’ according to a press release. Thomas’ keen eye and affinity for capturing natural-looking moments brought to life ‘a child’s-eye view of the possibilities for play and delight in less-than-hospitable environments.’ Many high-profile photographers of the time had been capturing life on the city streets, aiming…

“Hud is a 1963 American Western film directed by Martin Ritt and starring Paul Newman, Melvyn Douglas, Brandon deWilde, and Patricia Neal. It was produced by Ritt and Newman’s recently founded company, Salem Productions, and was their first film for Paramount Pictures. Hud was filmed on location on the Texas Panhandle, including Claude, Texas. Its screenplay was by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr. and was based on Larry McMurtry‘s 1961 novel, Horseman, Pass By. The film’s title character, Hud Bannon, was a minor character in the original screenplay, but was reworked as the lead role. With its main character an antihero, Hud was later described as a revisionist Western. The film centers on the ongoing conflict between principled patriarch Homer Bannon and his unscrupulous and arrogant son, Hud, during an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease putting the family’s…

Left to right: Claude Simon, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Robert Pinget, publisher Jérôme Lindon, Samuel Beckett, Nathalie Sarraute

“The Nouveau Roman (French pronunciation: ​[nuvo ʁɔmɑ̃], ‘new novel’) is a type of 1950s French novel that diverged from classical literary genres. Émile Henriot coined the term in an article in the popular French newspaperLe Monde on May 22, 1957 to describe certain writers who experimented with style in each novel, creating an essentially new style each time. Most of the founding authors were published by Les Éditions de Minuit with the strong support of Jérôme Lindon. Alain Robbe-Grillet, an influential theorist as well as writer of the Nouveau Roman, published a series of essays on the nature and future of the novel which were later collected in Pour un Nouveau Roman. Rejecting many of the established features of the novel to date, Robbe-Grillet regarded many earlier novelists…

John Coltrane Handwritten – A Love Supreme (1965)

“Spiritual jazz (or astral jazz) is a sub-genre of jazz that originated in the United States during the 1960s. The genre is characterized by its chaotic and noisy version on jazz that focuses on transcendence and spirituality. John Coltrane‘s A Love Supreme (1965) is considered a landmark album in the genre. During the 1960s in the United States, the civil rights movement was occurring,^[2] causing societal change, political movements, and the desire of the marginalized to have their voices heard. As a result, African-American people were given more freedom to celebrate their culture and to express themselves religiously.^[2] This lead to a desire to push the conventions of jazz, with some artists choosing to search for transcendence and spirituality in their music. John Coltrane released A Love Supreme in 1965, which was generally considered the birthplace…

Taxicab driver at the wheel with two passengers, N.Y.C. 1956

“Diane Arbus (… March 14, 1923 – July 26, 1971) was an American photographer. Arbus’s imagery helped to normalize marginalized groups and highlight the importance of proper representation of all people. She photographed a wide range of subjects including strippers, carnival performers, nudists, people with dwarfism, children, mothers, couples, elderly people, and middle-class families. She photographed her subjects in familiar settings: their homes, on the street, in the workplace, in the park. ‘She is noted for expanding notions of acceptable subject matter and violates canons of the appropriate distance between photographer and subject. By befriending, not objectifying her subjects, she was able to capture in her work a rare psychological intensity.’ In his 2003 New York Times Magazine article, ‘Arbus Reconsidered,’ Arthur Lubow states, ‘She was fascinated by people who were visibly creating their own identities—cross-dressers…