Cigarette smoke drifts over the surface of the desk—the picture of [Pilate’s] wife when she still had her looks, the onyx box from Caesar, the clay plaque with the imprint of his first son’s hand on it, made while he was still a child in nursery school. Pilate squints at the man through the smoke and asks his question. He asks it half because he would give as much as even his life to hear...
Preface and Part 1 can be found here. II. “The guy you all are doing this party for is a writer.” Freddie opened the door of the stairwell of the apartment building for me. “Sterling Johnson’s his name. He’s set to have a novel come out this spring.” We entered the hallway from the stairwell. It was dark and narrow. Freddie walked in front of me. “Till then, he needs us to help make...
Hello and welcome to the inaugural episode of The Two Cities Podcast. It’s our hope that the podcast will be a place where any one listening can find something that will challenge or stimulate their thinking. As with the written portion of the site, we do think that your involvement as a reader can prove mutually beneficial. Therefore, consider yourself earnestly invited to take part in these discussions! This week’s guest on the podcast is...
Make sure you check out The Two Cities Friday October 11th to catch our interview with writer and thinker Corinna Nicolaou. Her project One None Gets Some has been garnering a lot of attention lately and in this episode of the podcast, we discuss, among other things, how the project came to be, how she deals with comment trolls and where she sees the project going in the future. Here’s a preview of our conversation:
We have been conditioned by society to think that we are exceptional people. By exceptional here, I mean that we believe we are the exceptions to the rule; that we are the diamond in the rough, the hero of a story in which the camera is always centered upon us. In essence, this means that we often believe that we are the exceptional heroes of a story destined to end well (and by this I mean that we think we are entitled to a story that ends well; this is not to say that no one will have a story that ends well; rather, it is simply arguing that we are not inherently entitled to have stories that end in this way). This belief is, for all intents and purposes, an illusion. That being said, how did we arrive at this place as a culture?
“We are the people who leap in the dark, we are the people on the knees of the gods. In our very flesh, (r)evolution works out the clash of cultures. It makes us crazy constantly, but if the center holds, we’ve made some kind of evolutionary step forward.” ...
“What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best, power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love. And this is what we must see as we move on.”
-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. from “Where do We Go From Here?” Delivered at the 11th Annual SCLC Convention, August 16th, 1967
This is a story about the stories we tell ourselves every time we turn on the television, and every time we leave our homes. They’re the stories we tell whenever we see someone and assume we know who they are, what they’re about, before we’ve met them, before we’ve heard the actual stories that make them who they are. The Zimmerman trial ended a week ago, and there’s been a strong reaction to the verdict. I haven’t...
Let me begin with a bit of full disclosure. I’m black. My wife is white. And we’re going to have our first child this summer. This commercial obviously hits close to home. That being said, the following post about the Cheerios commercial is, surprisingly, not going to be about race or the ensuing “shitstorm” it’s causing online. If you haven’t already heard, the commercial shows a biracial child asking her white mother a question and...
Note: This review was written before professional basketball player Jason Collins came out as gay today in Sports Illustrated. I saw the movie 42 tonight, and I have to say, I kind of enjoyed it. Yes, I know it was extremely sentimental at some points. During certain scenes I could have sworn I was going to get a cavity from all the sugary sweetness of those early heart warming familial moments. That being said, I...
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