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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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Saying goodbye, from a distance: Mourners craft new and innovative funeral practices to honor the dead during pandemic
CHICAGO — Hours before the grandfather died on a COVID-19 hospital floor, his closest kin entered the room two at a time, all covered in protective gowns, gloves, masks and face shields . Barely breathing, the family patriarch pointed to each of his loved ones, then to his heart, and raised a fist in the air. This was not how relatives had envisioned their last moments with 68-year-old Rubén Beltrán of northwest suburban Hanover Park, one of more than 12,000 lives lost to the new virus in Illinois and 1.4 million worldwide. “But it was a blessing that we were able to say goodbye,” said grandda...
Chicago Tribune
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Commentary: Youth must lead on climate change fight
The election of Joe Biden as the 46th president of the United States came as a massive relief to climate activists around the world, myself included. But it will take a lot more than an election to beat back this existential threat.Biden has a promising climate action plan, but getting it through a nearly evenly divided Senate and past a conservative-dominated Supreme Court will be tremendously difficult. We’re going to need all hands on deck.Over the past several months, I have been working with young activists from around the country and world on climate issues. I am struck by the impressive...
Tribune News Service
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A woman's place? Out hunting with spears, study finds
Washington (AFP) - A new study says a woman's place might never have been at home to begin with.Scientists said Wednesday they had discovered the 9,000-year-old remains of a young woman in the Peruvian Andes alongside a well-stocked big game hunting toolkit.Based on a further analysis of 27 individuals at burial sites with similar tools, a team led by Randall Haas at the University of California, Davis concluded that between 30 to 50 percent of hunters in the Americas during this period may have been women.The paper, published in the journal Science Advances, contradicts the prevalent notion t...
AFP