Cultural Divide: Conversations across a troubled America ahead of the 2020 election
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This occasional series taps into the American conversation at a time of restlessness and deep political fault lines. Stories will explore art, music, film, literature and other cultural touchstones that will define, bind and divide us ahead of the 2020 presidential election. The nation is at a crossroads, and many voices, some loud, some not, are wondering who we are and where we’re going.
Aleshea Harris is part of a vanguard of young, African American playwrights boring into questions of race and history through humor, drama, absurdity and tragedy.
Oklahoma may be Trump country, but the home of Woody Guthrie still inspires progressive musicians taking a stand with their songs of hope and change.
A bit of optical magic happened last spring when Alba, the Venezuelan matriarch in “Jane the Virgin,” was sworn in as an American citizen.
Zombies lurk beyond the train tracks.
The leaves were yellow and plum, the clouds thin in the sky, when Cortez Oates, known as the rapper Rubberband OG, walked amid suspended rusted steel blocks carved with the names of those who came before.
The music stopped and Daniel Harnsberger — all 6-foot-5, 237 pounds of him — burst through the black curtain and jumped into the ring.
Along a wooded road, where a school bus had finished its morning run and the mailman was hours away, Kim Drew Wright sat at a dining room table cluttered with poems and short stories that have stoked her political activism and led her to a pivotal battleground in the nation’s culture wars.
Percy B. Long wore wingtips and rolled his own cigarettes.
Recording in a row-house studio on a working-class street, Natalie Wynn, a trans woman with defiant opinions and platinum wigs, has emerged as a popular YouTube provocateur, taking on right-wing extremists, radical feminists, climate-change deniers and notions of identity in our seething, selfie-obsessed, meme-driven age.
The pickup raced along scrub, mesquite and creosote.
