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The Price of the Ticket

by Kia Corthron

Originally published in the July/August 2016 issue of The Dramatist

Three years ago I was standing in the lobby of a theater, the typical Broadway cluster-mob awaiting entrance, with more than half the horde African-American. This would be logical, as the show was the musical revue After Midnight, a refurbishing of a prior concert piece entitled Cotton Club Parade celebrating Ellington-era jazz and dance. Inside, my sister and I were led to our orchestra seats, and I looked around: not another black face in sight. It took me a moment to realize that The Mystery of the Vanishing Black Folks likely would have been quickly resolved had we moved up to the balconies. But from where I sat, observing the complexion of the performers versus that of the onlookers, it was the Cotton Club, the Colors entertaining the Caucasians, and that the upper tiers may have been filled with black faces was not exactly comforting, an economically induced throwback to Jim Crow segregation with African Americans relegated to the peanut gallery.

In this excerpt from The America Syndrome: Apocalypse, War, and Our Call to Greatness, new in paperback this autumn, Betsy Hartmann discusses what has come to be called "the greening of hate"—that is, the fusion of environmentalism with anti-immigrant bigotry, an ideology which was shared by both the Christchurch and El Paso gunmen. She also touches on modern eugenics in the U.S., and stresses the need to avoid simple dualities in discussing questions of population and environment. 

Excerpted from Paul Auster's A Life in Words: Conversations with I. B. Siegumfeldt, available for purchase from our site at 25% off list price.

In the conversation below, acclaimed novelist Paul Auster and scholar I. B. Siegumfeldt discuss Auster's "Portrait of an Invisible Man," which comprises one half of The Invention of Solitude and served as the pivotal piece of writing for Auster's movement into a style wholly his own. Auster discusses the hazards of literary education ("I’d come to such a point of self-consciousness that I somehow believed that every novel had to be completely worked out in advance"); the death of his father ("My father came from the generation of men who wore neckties, and apparently he kept every tie he ever owned. When he died, there must have been a hundred of them in his closet. You are confronted by these ties, which are, in a sense, a miniature history of his life."); and the vitality of the unconscious ("I understood that everything comes from within and moves out. It’s never the reverse. Form doesn’t precede content. The material itself will find its own form as you’re working through it."). We hope you enjoy!

Comedian, activist, and author Barry Crimmins died last month at the age of 64. One of the legends of the Boston comedy scene, as well as a childhood abuse survivor and a vigilante anti-pedophilia watchdog who helped expose the prevalance of child pornography on early AOL chatrooms, Crimmins was as influential as he was inimitable. In 2004, he published his personal and political memoir Never Shake Hands with a War Criminal. Below are two representatively eclectic chapters from a very funny and yet very serious book: the first is about starting Boston's first true comedy club, the Ding Ho, while living homeless on the outskirts of town, and the second is about snubbing the "satanic" architect of the United States government's atrocities in Vietnam. 

The refrain we hear over and over, in the United States at least, is that people today are apathetic about politics. Yet it turns out that this is far from the case. Voters in the U.S. and in democracies around the world are more engaged in politics than they've ever been. The catch is that they're disillusioned with the democratic process itself. Only 33% of Europeans have faith in the EU. The U.S. Congress has a 69% negative rating. So what gives? In Against Elections, set to be published on April 17th, David Van Reybrouck diagnoses the symptoms of our ailing democracies and comes up with a radical solution: drawing lots, rather than voting, to determine our politicians, just as the ancient Athenians did. Here as an exclusive excerpt on the Seven Stories Blog is the book's introduction, from former Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan, and the first chapter of Van Reybrouck's book. 

Yesterday the the New York Times ran a feature implying there are no major health risks associated with the upcoming move to 5G cellular networks. The piece did make a convincing case that an often reproduced graph on the dangers of cell phones, first created by a Dr. Bill P. Curry in 2000, contains a serious error. But the dangers of electromagnetic fields (EMF) are broader than the article mentions, and the effects have by no means been exhaustively studied. As a primer to the subject, here is the first chapter of Martin Blank's Overpowered: What Science Tells Us About the Dangers of Cell Phones and Other WiFi-Age Devices.