Making Moves at the Marshall Chess Club

 

Playing by the book: Marshall Chess Club member Edward Frumkin makes a move.

“Writer Frank Brady was 9 years old when he first learned how to play chess. His older brother had bought a small chess set, and they figured out the moves together. Brady, who is now 87, still remembers the exact moment he truly became fascinated with the game of chess. ... Later that year, Brady decided to take a trip downtown to Greenwich Village to visit the acclaimed Marshall Chess Club—he had read about it in several chess magazines. ...”

Voice

W - Marshall Chess Club

2008 October: World Chess Championship 1972, 2009 January: Sicilian Defence, 2009 February: Mikhail Tal, 2009 February: Garry Kasparov, 2009 April: Vasily Smyslov, 2009 August: Chess960, 2009 November: Bent Larsen,2011 November:  The Lewis Chessmen, 2012 July: 40 Years Ago Today: Chess Rivals Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky Meet in the ‘Match of the Century’, 2015 September: The Subtext Buried In Seven Great Movie Chess Scenes, 2018 December: The Last Chess Shop in New York City, 2019 May: Deep Blue, 2021 May: Chess in the arts, 2021 July: The Sharp Game

 

Visit the Marshall Chess Club in NYC, they have events going on almost every single day

Trump’s Missing Call Logs Present a Challenge for Jan. 6 Investigators

 

Protesters storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

“The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol has discovered gaps in official White House telephone logs from the day of the riot, finding few records of calls by President Donald J. Trump from critical hours when investigators know that he was making them. Investigators have not uncovered evidence that any official records were tampered with or deleted, and it is well known that Mr. Trump routinely used his personal cellphone, and those of his aides, to talk with other aides, congressional allies and outside confidants, bypassing the normal channels of presidential communication.But the sparse call records present a major obstacle to a central element of the panel’s work: recreating what Mr. Trump was doing behind closed doors during the assault on Congress by a mob of his supporters. ...”

NY Times

NY Times: Republicans Who Railed About Clinton Emails Are Quiet on Trump’s Records

2021 February: 77 days: Trump’s campaign to subvert the election, 2021 July: Day of Rage: An In-Depth Look at How a Mob Stormed the Capitol, 2021 July: ‘A hit man sent them.’ Police at the Capitol recount the horrors of Jan. 6 as the inquiry begins., 2021 September: Among Those Who Marched Into the Capitol on Jan. 6: An F.B.I. Informant, 2021 October: Jan. 6 Was Worse Than We Knew, 2021 October: 90 Seconds of Rage, 2022 January: Every Day Is Jan. 6 Now, 2022 January: Oath Keepers Leader Charged With Seditious Conspiracy in Jan. 6 Investigation

​Road movie

 

“A road movie is a film genre in which the main characters leave home on a road trip, typically altering the perspective from their everyday lives. Road movies often depict travel in the hinterlands, with the films exploring the theme of alienation and examining the tensions and issues of the cultural identity of a nation or historical period; this is all often enmeshed in a mood of actual or potential menace, lawlessness, and violence, a ‘distinctly existential air‘ and is populated by restless, ‘frustrated, often desperate characters’. The setting includes not just the close confines of the car as it moves on highways and roads, but also booths in diners and rooms in roadside motels, all of which helps to create intimacy and tension between the characters. Road movies tend to focus on the theme of masculinity (with the man often going through some type of crisis), some type of rebellion, car culture, and self-discovery. The core theme of road movies is ‘rebellion against conservative social norms’. ...”

W - Road movie

 

It Happened One Night (1934) is about a rich woman who learns about regular Americans when she travels the Interstate system by car.

Channel One | We Out Here: Online & On Air

 

“Channel One Sound System is one of the UK’s best known and most loved reggae sound systems.  Having taken over the running of their father’s sound in 1979, Mikey Dread and his brother Jah T took the sound to local blues parties and dances.  Mikey took the name Channel One as homage to the  legendary Channel One studio in Jamaica.  In 1983, Channel One started playing at Notting Hill Carnival (check out video clip of Carnival 2018 in the hyperlink), they have played at Carnival every year since. ...”

Channel One (Video)

YouTube: Channel One | We Out Here: Online & On Air | March  59:57

William Parker / Raining On The Moon – Corn Meal Dance (2007)

 

“Corn Meal Dance is an immaculate album work that we are deeply honored to present. Back in 2007, its creation & release is how AUM Fidelity celebrated our 10th Anniversary as a purveyor of regenerative sounds. Wisdom of an eternal nature is to be found here – and sung & danced along to – with love in your heart. ... These pieces pursue an elemental purity through mystical language and metaphor. What marks this as unique in Parker's long list of recordings is its primary accessibility. And if that serves the purpose of introducing his vision to new ears, it has more than done its job. When jazz historians look back on music at the turn of this century, William Parker will stand as a giant among men. ...”

Bandcamp (Audio)

W - Corn Meal Dance

Discogs (Video)

amazon

YouTube: Pomigliano Jazz Festival 2009- William Parker Chamber Trio

2022 January: A Guide to William Parker

​The Fiendishly Complicated Board Game That Takes 1,500 Hours to Play: Discover The Campaign for North Africa

 

“Monopoly is notoriously time-consuming. On the childhood Christmas I received my first copy of that Parker Brothers classic, my dad and I started a game that ended up spreading over two or three days. That may have had to do with my appreciation for Monopoly’s aesthetic far exceeding my grasp of its aim, and I’ve since realized that it can be played in about an hour. That’s still a good deal longer than, say, a game of checkers, but it falls somewhat short of the league occupied by The Campaign for North Africa — which is, in fact, a league of its own. Since its publication in 1979, it’s been known as the longest board game in existence, requiring 1,500 hours (or 62 days) to complete. ...”

Open Culture (Video)

W - The Campaign for North Africa

​In the ‘Genocide Olympics,’ Are We All Complicit?

 

“The Olympics have been in a state of moral crisis for some time now, mired in countless controversies over bribery, corruption, financial waste, cheating, environmental damage, forced displacement of local residents and, more recently, the pandemic. But as the Times sports columnist Kurt Streeter wrote last week, ‘Beijing 2022 sits at a whole other level of discord.’ Casting the darkest pall over the Games by far are the human rights abuses occurring about 2,000 miles away in the region of Xinjiang, where one million or more Uighurs, a Chinese Muslim ethnic group, and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities are reportedly being subjected to mass detentions, forced labor, sterilization and torture. Their repression has been described by the Biden administration, among other governments, as nothing less than a genocide. ...”

NY Times

The Graphic Novel as Architectural Narrative: Berlin and Aya

 

“The comic strip, la bande dessinée, the graphic novel. These are all part of a medium with an intrinsic connection to architectural storytelling. It’s a medium that has long been used to fantasise and speculate on possible architectural futures, or in a less spectacular context, used as a device to simply show the perspectival journey through an architectural project. When the comic strip meshes fiction with architectural imagination, however, it’s not only the speculation on future architectural scenarios that takes place. It’s also the recording and the critiquing of the urban conditions of either our contemporary cities or the cities of the past. ...”

ArchDaily

​Africa Cup of Nations review: sorrow, anger and Mané’s redemption

 “Our writers relive their highs and lows of a tournament completely overshadowed by the Olembe Stadium tragedy. … This Cup of Nations was played under a shadow from the moment eight supporters died outside Olembe Stadium a fortnight ago. There is no excusing what happened at a venue surrounded by vast spaces and the depressing sense remains that its causes will be swept under the carpet. After driving back to Yaoundé the following day and speaking with Romaric, who had been in the ground and encountered people who had been caught up in the crush as he left, the horror of what had occurred started to become clear. A subsequent visit to the emergency hospital brought some harrowing testimonies; these are, sadly, the words and images that linger. …”

Guardian

The Athletic – Cox: Italy-esque Senegal shackled Egypt with five men – they were deserved winners (Audio)

NY Times – Africa Cup of Nations: Soccer Tournament Offers Joy Amid Coups and Covid

****An African Cup of Nations Primer

AFCON 2021: The Review

W – 2021 Africa Cup of Nations

YouTube: Senegal vs Egypt | AFCON 2021 FINAL HIGHLIGHTS | 02/06/2022, Cameroon vs Egypt – CAF African Cup of Nations 2022 2:10:39

​The Largest Autocracy on Earth

 

“In 1947, Albert Einstein, writing in this magazine, proposed the creation of a single world government to protect humanity from the threat of the atomic bomb. His utopian idea did not take hold, quite obviously, but today, another visionary is building the simulacrum of a cosmocracy. Mark Zuckerberg, unlike Einstein, did not dream up Facebook out of a sense of moral duty, or a zeal for world peace. This summer, the population of Zuckerberg’s supranational regime reached 2.9 billion monthly active users, more humans than live in the world’s two most populous nations—China and India—combined. ...”

The Atlantic

​Cooking with Virginia Woolf By Valerie Stivers

 

“The boeuf en daube in To the Lighthouse, a 1927 novel by Virginia Woolf about an English family on vacation in the Hebrides, is one of the best-known dishes in literature. Obsessed over for many chapters by the protagonist, Mrs. Ramsay, and requiring many days of preparation, it is unveiled in a scene of crucial significance. This ‘savory confusion of brown and yellow meats,’ in its huge pot, gives off an ‘exquisite scent of olives and oil and juice.’ It serves as a monument to the joys of family life and a celebration of fleeting moments. Thus, it is with fear and trembling that I suggest that Woolf’s boeuf en daube, from a cook’s perspective, is a travesty, and that its failures may prove instructive. ...”

The Paris Review

2019 April: Bloomsbury Group, 2020 August:  How Virginia Woolf Kept Her Brother Alive in Letters, 2021 January: Michael Cunningham on Virginia Woolf’s Literary Revolution, 2021 June: A House of One’s Own - Janet Malcolm

All the terra cotta beauty of an early uptown apartment building

“Sometimes you come across a building so rich with decoration, it knocks you out. That was my reaction when I found myself at 45 Tiemann Place, near the corner of Broadway and just below 125th Street. The building appears to be just another early 1900s apartment residence in the slightly askew neighborhood of Manhattanville—where the grid plan doesn’t necessarily hold and streets tend to have names based on early people and places in the area, not just numbers. ...”

Ephemeral New York

Éliane Radigue: For a Composer at 90, There’s Nothing but Time

“Éliane Radigue lives and works in a second-floor apartment in the Montparnasse neighborhood of Paris. A weeping fig tree looms above her head; across the loft-like room are three large windows adorned with house plants. The windows face a school across the street which, she wrote in a recent email, ‘gives its rhythm to days, weeks and months.’ She has lived there for the past 50 years, steadfastly writing a great deal of slow, very minimal, mostly electronic music. ...”

NY Times (Audio)

2018 May: Trilogie de la Mort (1988-1993), 2018 October: The Deeply Meditative Electronic Music of Avant-Garde Composer Eliane Radigue, 2019 February: Adnos I-III, 2019 May: Occam Ocean, Vol. 1 (2017)

NY Times (Audio)

2018 May: Trilogie de la Mort (1988-1993), 2018 October: The Deeply Meditative Electronic Music of Avant-Garde Composer Eliane Radigue, 2019 February: Adnos I-III, 2019 May: Occam Ocean, Vol. 1 (2017)

Black History, Black Freedom, and Black Love

 

“... From critical race theory to the 1619 Project, Black intellectuals are reshaping conversations on race in America. Now seven of those preeminent voices share their insight on the reckoning with race in America in three parts: past, present, and future. Gain a foundational understanding of the history of white supremacy and discover a path forward through the limitless capacity and resilience of Black love.The class includes several hours of videos about ‘the history you weren’t taught in school” from an absolutely incredible lineup of instructors: Angela Davis, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Jelani Cobb, Sherrilyn Ifill, John McWhorter, and Cornel West. This is a fantastic resource. ...”

Black History Month (Video)

amazon

2021 April: The 1619 Project, 2021 November: The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

A Time For Healing - Kahil El'Zabar Quartet (2021)

 

“Chicago’s legendary spiritual jazz shaman Kahil El’Zabar returns, leading an enviable ensemble of young masters from his hometown! Kahil El’Zabar delivers yet another epic double LP’s worth of ancient/future music for the mind, body and soul. From swinging jazz that sings of his Chicago pedigree, to talking drums and soothing spiritual grooves that reconnect Black Classical Music with its African roots. Multi-percussionist, band-leader, vocalist, composer, conductor and educator, Kahil El’Zabar has been at the forefront of the unceasingly creative avant-garde jazz scene in Chicago and beyond for over 4 decades. ...”

Bandcamp (Audio)

Discogs (Video)

amazon

Football Is Sinking in Crypto Snake Oil

 

“Football fans have had to put up with a lot lately. Match-going diehards have been squeezed for decades, with tickets in many of Europe’s top leagues becoming unaffordable. Attending away games isn’t just expensive but near impossible for many fans, with the spread of matches across weekdays and a constant rise in fixture congestion. Even for those stuck at home, things aren’t much easier. TV and digital streaming rights are often split between three or more providers, meaning fans have to shell out hundreds of dollars a season. Fans are sacrificing time, money, and attention just as all these things seem scarcer than ever. ...”

Jacobin

The Athletic: Football and cryptocurrency sponsorship: is the free-for-all over? (Audio)

​An Electrifying View of the Heart of the Milky Way

 

Electrical storms light up the center of the Milky Way galaxy. A new radio image reveals supernova remnants, threads of energy and other features both new and known.

“Noise and chaos reign at the heart of the Milky Way, our home galaxy, or so it appears in an astonishing image captured recently by astronomers in South Africa. The image, taken by the MeerKAT radio telescope, an array of 64 antennas spread across five miles of desert in northern South Africa, reveals a storm of activity in the central region of the Milky Way, with threads of radio emission laced and kinked through space among bubbles of energy. At the very center Sagittarius A*, a well-studied supermassive black hole, emits its own exuberant buzz. We are accustomed to seeing galaxies, from afar, as soft, glowing eggs of light or as majestic, bejeweled whirlpools. Rarely do we glimpse the roiling beneath the clouds — all the forms of frenzy that a hundred million or so stars can get up to. ...”

NY Times

​Post-structuralism

 

Meaning might be ceaselessly deferred along a signifying chain … cog-dog-log … without any possibility of an ultimate destination.

“Post-structuralism is a term for philosophical and literary forms of theory that both build upon and reject ideas established by structuralism, the intellectual project that preceded it. Though post-structuralists all present different critiques of structuralism, common themes among them include the rejection of the self-sufficiency of structuralism, as well as an interrogation of the binary oppositions that constitute its structures. ... Writers whose works are often characterised as post-structuralist include: Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Judith Butler, Jean Baudrillard and Julia Kristeva, although many theorists who have been called ‘post-structuralist’ have rejected the label. ...”

Wikipedia

From Structuralism to Post-Structuralism

Prezi 

YouTube: Structuralism to Post-Structuralism

Hotter THE Battle+Dub

 

“A rough tune from the Conscious Minds featuring a serious horn line. Hotter The Battle + Dub: Conscious Minds. Whip Them Jah: Clint Eastwood.  Pablo's Mood: Augustus Pablo. Peace and Love In The Ghetto: Jah Woosh. ...”

Mixcloud (Audio)

YouTube: Hotter THE Battle+Dub

Radio On - Christopher Petit (1979)

 

“We’re pleased to present the trailer and posters for the new 4K restoration of Christopher Petit’s debut feature Radio On (1979), which sees its North American premiere at the New York Film Festival on October 4 and 5 before opening at the Metrograph on October 15. Writing for Film Comment in 2007, Chris Chang called Radio On an ‘exquisitely bleak yet thoroughly transcendent’ road movie. London DJ Robert (David Beames) heads east to Bristol to investigate the death of his brother, and he’s accompanied by one of the great soundtracks in British cinema: David Bowie, Devo, Kraftwerk, Robert Fripp, Ian Dury. ...”

Criterion: Trailer and Posters for Radio On (Video)

Film Comment: Event Horizon

W - Radio On

YouTube: Mark Kermode reviews Radio On (1979) | BFI Player

​Heart & Soul of NYC

 

“Even though Jay and Alicia  banged us out with one of the hottest New York anthems of all time last year - there's always room for more love letter to one of the most beloved cities in the world. Released right as both the weather and NBA playoffs are heating up, ‘Heart & Soul of NYC’ was produced by Kevin Couliau (the well known French streetball documentarist) who spent last summer in the five boroughs hunting down 'supreme blacktop action' which he was able to excellently capture on film. With rhymes by Red Cafe (who is fresh off his ‘I'm Ill’ success) and a dope beat by Pete Rock,  this track just shows what a compatible mix hip hop, basketball and NYC really is.”

YouTube: Heart & Soul of New York City

2012 November: Your Guide to the Brooklyn Nets, 2013 March: March Madness 2013, 2013 October: Rucker Park, 2014 January: History of the high five, 2015 February: Dean Smith (February 28, 1931 – February 7, 2015), 2015 June: Basketball’s Obtuse Triangle, 2015 September: Joint Ventures: How sneakers became high fashion and big business, 2015 October: Loose Balls - Terry Pluto (2007), 2015 December: Welcome to Smarter Basketball, 2016 January: The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams (1994), 2016 January: A Long Hardwood Journey, 2016 March: American Hustle - Alexandra Starr, 2016 November: 2016–17 College Basketball, 2017 November: 2017-18 College Basketball, 2017 March: N.C.A.A. Bracket Predictions: Who the Tournament Experts Pick, 2017 June: The Rise and Fall of the High-Top Sneaker, 2018 January: Chaos Is This College Basketball Season’s Only Constant, 2018 March: The End of March Madness?, 2018 March: The 2018 March Madness Cinderella Guide, 2018 August: Ancestor Work In Street Basketball, 2018 November: Where Have College Basketball’s Star Point Guards Gone?, 2019 November: Players to Watch in the 2019-20 College Basketball Season, 2020 September: Ross Gay: Have I Even Told You Yet About the Courts I’ve Loved?, 2021 February: On Hustles

Catherine Wagner - Constantine Fragments (2014)

 

“Rome Works investigates and interprets the history of culture. The photographs include sculptural masterpieces both within and outside of museum archives. Although rooted in antiquity each image is embedded with some form of marker that creates a collision in time. The process of conservation, the physical moving of an artifact, or the recreation of a figure from isolated fragments - serve to disrupt the historical iconography allowing for a more contemporary reading. The images often focus on overlooked details, illuminating unwritten histories. ...”

Catherine Wagner: Rome Works

Whitney Museum of American Art: Catherine Wagne

​10 Ideas to Fix Democracy

 

“For 15 consecutive years, Freedom House’s annual tally has recorded a decline in the number of democracies worldwide. It’s a steady loss of ground that Larry Diamond, a political scientist at Stanford University, calls a ‘democratic recession.’ And no event put the reality of democratic backsliding more dramatically on display than the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021—when the world’s oldest liberal democracy endured the first violent presidential transition in its 245-year history. As we mark that event’s dubious anniversary, we’re reminded how fragile democracy really is. Democracy is on the defensive, and the reasons are as deep as they are familiar. Growing inequality has fed a global mood that democratic institutions aren’t serving their citizens. The internet and social media have hypercharged political polarization and cultural divides, which populists easily exploit. ...”

Foreign Policy

​The Rich Legacy of Philadelphia Free Jazz

“As the birthplace of great innovators like Billie Holiday, Lee Morgan, Trudy Pitts, McCoy Tyner, ’Philly Joe’ Jones, James Mtume, the Heath Brothers, and Bobby Timmons and home to John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Archie Shepp, and others, Philadelphia’s contributions to jazz are well known. Despite the notoriety that Philly’s bebop, hard-bop, and organ trio sound has enjoyed throughout the decades, the city’s free-jazz and avant-garde contingent has been less well-documented.In the 1960s, Philadelphia-born musicians like bassist Henry Grimes and drummer Rashied Ali played in some legendary ensembles led by progressive jazz giants like Albert Ayler and Coltrane. ...”

Bandcamp (Audio)

Trump Had Role in Weighing Proposals to Seize Voting Machines

 

Former President Donald J. Trump spoke to thousands of supporters at a rally in Texas on Saturday.

“Six weeks after Election Day, with his hold on power slipping, President Donald J. Trump directed his lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, to make a remarkable call. Mr. Trump wanted him to ask the Department of Homeland Security if it could legally take control of voting machines in key swing states, three people familiar with the matter said.Mr. Giuliani did so, calling the department’s acting deputy secretary, who said he lacked the authority to audit or impound the machines. ...”

*****NY Times

*****YouTube: Trump Tied Directly To Voting Machine Plot

“About halfway into his Texas rally on Saturday evening, Donald J. Trump pivoted toward the teleprompter and away from a meandering set of grievances to rattle off a tightly prepared list of President Biden’s failings and his own achievements. ... Mr. Trump, who later went on to talk about ‘that beautiful, beautiful house that happens to be white,’ has left increasingly little doubt about his intentions, plotting an influential role in the 2022 midterm elections and another potential White House run. But a fresh round of skirmishes over his endorsements, fissures with the Republican base over vaccines — a word Mr. Trump conspicuously left unsaid at Saturday’s rally — and new polling all show how his longstanding vise grip on the Republican Party is facing growing strains. ...”

NY Times: Trump’s Grip on G.O.P. Faces New Strains

​John Ashbery: outtakes from the film series, USA: Poetry

 

“John Ashbery is filmed on March 4 and 6, 1966 in New York City while both reading his poems and being interviewed. Richard O. Moore interviews Ashbery one-on-one in Ashbery's apartment, and Ashbery together with painter Jane Freilicher in her studio. 2nd edition (1978 release)“

YouTube   46:37

​A New Wave of American Buyers Has Set Its Sights on European Soccer

 

“Last May, Venezia FC celebrated its improbable return to Italy’s top tier, Serie A, for the first time in exactly two decades, completing a remarkable five-year rise from the fourth division. Players celebrated with a ferry ride through Venice’s storied canals, steered by gondoliers wearing traditional candy cane uniforms. Among those celebrating in the victory parade was Duncan Niederauer, the club’s American president and majority shareholder since 2020. Niederauer, the former CEO of the New York Stock Exchange, had been part of an American ownership group that first bought into Venezia in 2018, two years after the club emerged from its third bankruptcy in a decade. …”

The Ringer

The Difficult Odyssey of James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’

 

James Joyce looking troubled in 1922—but he wasn’t the only one having difficulties. 

“The wily hero of The Odyssey is repeatedly aided by women: Athena, goddess of wisdom; the Phaecian princess Nausicaa; and numerous other female characters play important roles in helping Odysseus return home to Ithaca and his wife, Penelope. Three-ish millennia after Homer composed his epic poem, Irish writer James Joyce decided he would pattern his new novel after The Odyssey. In a twist of cosmic coincidence, Joyce (1882–1941) himself, even more than his Ulysses protagonist Leopold Bloom, was aided by women in his journey. ...”

Voice

YouTube: Why should you read James Joyce's "Ulysses"?

W - Obscenity trial of Ulysses in The Little Review

amazon: James Joyce's Odyssey: A Guide to the Dublin of Ulysses

2011 March: Passages from James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake" (1965-67), 2013: Dubliners, 2014 May: The Dead (1987 film), 2014 May: “Have I Ever Left It?” by Mark O'Connell, 2014 July: Digital Dubliners, 2014 September: Read "Ulysses Seen", A Graphic Novel Adaptation of James Joyce’s Classic, 2015 January: The Mapping Dubliners Project, 2015 February: Davy Byrne’s, 2016 January: Port and Docks, 2016 February: Hear James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake Read Unabridged & Set to Music By 17 Different Artists, 2016 April: Nassau Street, 2016 May: Stephen’s Green, 2016 October: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), 2016 November: Skerries, 2017 January: Walking Ulysses | Joyce's Dublin Today, 2018 October: Bloomsday Explained, 2020 March: Ireland’s Voices, 2020 June: Stephen Dedalus, 2020 November: The Homeric Parallel in Ulysses: Joyce, Nabokov, and Homer in Maps, 2021 January: The Socialism of James Joyce, 2021 March: Imagining Nora Barnacle’s Love Letters to James Joyce Image

We Still Can’t See American Slavery for What It Was

 “The historian Marcus Rediker opens ‘The Slave Ship: A Human History‘ with a harrowing reconstruction of the journey, for a captive, from shore to ship: The ship grew larger and more terrifying with every vigorous stroke of the paddles. The smells grew stronger and the sounds louder — crying and wailing from one quarter and low, plaintive singing from another; the anarchic noise of children given an underbeat by hands drumming on wood; the odd comprehensible word or two wafting through: someone asking for menney, water, another laying a curse, appealing to myabecca, spirits. An estimated 12.5 million people endured some version of this journey, captured and shipped mainly from the western coast of Africa to the Western Hemisphere during the four centuries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Of that number, about 10.7 million survived to reach the shores of the so-called New World. ...”

NY Times - Opinion: Jamelle Bouie