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Author Charles Soule wrote ‘Light of the Jedi’ — and in a galaxy far, far away, the story continues
Someone must leap into the abyss. And that someone is Charles Soule, son of Milwaukee and Grand Rapids, now keeper of the Jedi. Picture a job you wouldn’t want under any circumstance — say, presidential social-media consultant, Chicago Bears quarterback, cesspool scrubber — and Soule has you beat: He was tasked with (shudder) introducing a completely fresh storyline to the “Star Wars” universe. Meaning, no Luke, no Rey, no Han, no Leia, no Mandalorian, no Baby Yoda. Soule is no monster, but rather, a fine writer, a brand name in comic books, author of well-received science-fiction novels, and ...
Chicago Tribune
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How war monuments keep history lessons alive
“Prisoners of History: What Monuments to World II Tell us About our History and Ourselves” by Keith Lowe; William Collins (302 pages, $29.99) ––– A pedestal is a risky place to take a stand. In America, official tributes to leaders from Robert E. Lee to Abraham Lincoln have been destroyed or defaced. In Europe, memorials to Communist dictators have been torn down. In the Middle East, even massive images of ancient gods have been blown up. Keith Lowe’s “Prisoners of History: What Monuments to World II Tell us About our History and Ourselves” examines how different countries’ statues and museums...
New York Daily News
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Movie review: 'Scarface' meets Indian caste system in 'The White Tiger'
Animals abound in Ramin Bahrani’s “The White Tiger,” a wild and rollicking adaptation of Aravind Adiga’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel. Animals are how our protagonist, Balram (Adarsh Gourav, in a chameleonic performance), makes sense of the world into which he’s born: an oppressively hierarchical Indian society that rigidly classifies people according to their caste, class, religion and gender. Balram, a poor, undereducated villager, feels trapped in a metaphorical rooster coop, waiting to be slaughtered. He imagines escaping this cage, evolving into that rarest of creatures, born once in a ...
Tribune News Service
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Sterling K. Brown to narrate Lincoln documentary
Sterling K. Brown is lending his voice to a timely documentary series. The St. Louis native and star of NBC's "This Is Us" is the narrator of "Lincoln: Divided We Stand," beginning next month on CNN. Through interviews and re-creations, along with photos, letters and artifacts, the six-part series explores the political career and personal life of Abraham Lincoln. In a time of civil war, the president faced challenges that resonate with recent American history. Brown won Emmy Awards for his performances as Randall Pearson in "This Is Us" and as Christopher Darden in the FX limited series "The ...
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
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Female resident orcas especially disturbed by vessels, new research shows
SEATTLE — Female orcas are most thrown off from foraging when boats and vessels intrude closer than 400 yards, according to new research — troubling findings for the endangered population of southern resident orcas that desperately needs every mother and calf to survive. The research, gathered by attaching suction-cup electronic tags to the whales, is a clear wake-up call to the protection endangered mother orcas need, researchers and experts say. "Anything that takes food away from a mom trying to support a calf, that is something we should carefully consider," said Marla Holt, lead author on...
The Seattle Times
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How Marshawn Lynch's 'Beast Quake,' which just turned 10, helped prepare scientists for actual earthquakes
SEATTLE — "The crowd is silent now, as opposed to when the Saints have the ball," NBC broadcaster Tom Hammond said, before more than 66,000 fans refuted that fact. It was Jan. 8, 2011, and the 7-9 Seahawks led the 11-5 Saints, 34-30, with 3:40 left in the NFC wild-card game. At a supposedly silent Qwest Field in Seattle, Matt Hasselbeck took a snap at his own 33-yard line, turned and handed the ball to Marshawn Lynch. Amid a morass of broken tackles, the "Beast Quake" was born. Lynch — a 215-pound, 24-year-old torpedo — laid waste to New Orleans' defensive line, burrowing through Scott Shanle ...
The Seattle Times
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NASA cuts short hot fire test of Artemis I core stage
ORLANDO, Fla. — NASA lit up all four engines on the massive core stage for the Artemis I rocket that will travel to the moon at the end 2021 but cut off the test after a minute into an eight-minute test. The burn took place after 5 p.m. with the stage hooked up in the B-2 Test Stand at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. The hot fire was aiming to simulate the thrust the core stage of the Space Launch System rocket, generating 1.6 million pounds burning through more than 700,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen for more than eight minutes. But NASA shut it down after just a...
Orlando Sentinel
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Dolphin man: For 50 years, biologist has studied bottlenose dolphins from a research center on Florida’s Gulf Coast
CHICAGO – Beginning his work in marine biology, Randy Wells thought he was a shark guy. But the teenager whose family had just moved from Peoria to Florida’s Gulf Coast volunteered to help a local researcher study the migration patterns of the bottlenose dolphins off of Sarasota. And now it’s 50 years later and Wells — a staff scientist at Brookfield Zoo in suburban Chicago since 1989 — heads the world’s longest running study of a marine mammal population in the wild, tracking the lives, loves and losses of some 170 Sarasota Bay dolphins and delivering globally significant insight into these c...
Chicago Tribune
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In 'remarkable shift,' 4 out of 5 Texans say climate change is real. Now what?
During his time representing Fort Worth in the Texas House, Lon Burnam recalls a member of the governor's staff issuing a stern warning: Keep the words "climate change" in a piece of legislation, and the bill will be "dead on arrival." A lot has changed since Burnam, a Democrat, left office in 2015 and became the chair of the Tarrant Coalition on Environmental Awareness. In a "remarkable shift from the past," a University of Houston study published in December found that 81% of Texans agree that climate change is happening. That result, from a survey of 500 Texans conducted in October, now mat...
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
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This award-winning professor is rethinking how Black artists show death
PHILADELPHIA — When Jerry Philogene studies death, she doesn't just simply look at the moment when life ends. Philogene, an arts scholar and American Studies professor at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, looks at not only how artists show death as part of life, but also how Black people experience that morbidity that surrounds them. She draws on a mix of knowledge from sociology to vodou iconography. Philogene points to the work of Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson, who coined the term "social death" to describe how society did not extend humanity to enslaved people. Today, Bla...
The Philadelphia Inquirer
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