Referendum ballot questions rarely fail voter approval in Rhode Island, and they rarely attract much controversy or attention. Unlike many other states with initiative provisions that have allowed voters to bypass their legislatures to, for example, legalize recreational use of cannabis, RI has no mechanism for circumventing the General Assembly. As a result, almost all […]
Mixed Magic Theatre takes on a substantial challenge in dramatizing the two most well-known short stories by Zora Neale Hurston, “Sweat” and “The Gilded Six-Bits.” Characterized by subtle word play, idiomatic dialect, puns and heavy-handed biblical allusions, Hurston’s fiction has generally not translated well to the stage. Mixed Magic wisely inserts Hurston as a character, […]
Our cover artistically renders bullet holes as if this magazine has been shot through with a gun, motivated by the fatal but accidental shooting of William Parsons, a 15 year-old Central High School student who was waiting to be picked up outside another nearby city high school, the Providence Career and Technical Academy. By all […]
“The flashing is what we use to get people excited about” the satellite, designed and built by Brown University undergraduate students, that was launched into earth orbit from the International Space Station (ISS) in July, said Jacob Leiken, one of the project directors with Brown Space Engineering (BSE). “Our primary mission is to make space […]
[See also “Chain Gang“] Rhode Island Republican candidate for governor Giovanni Feroce has made his “Blockchain Center Development Act” – feroceforgovernor.com/fixri – a defining centerpiece of his campaign. He also advocates elimination of taxes on personal incomes, assets, and inventory as well as “right to work” legislation that would prohibit employer contracts from requiring employees […]
[See also motifri.com/dirty-war] By today, August 16, the number of participating newspapers and magazines editorializing about the importance of a free press has grown to more than 300. The New York Times collected links to many of them at the end of their own editorial. Whether this loosely co-ordinated effort will accomplish anything has been […]
On August 16 – our publication day – almost one hundred newspapers and magazines, ranging from major national dailies to small local operations, will respond to a call from Marjorie Pritchard, deputy managing editor for the editorial page of The Boston Globe, to editorialize against a ‘‘dirty war against the free press’’ being waged by […]
Robert Ellis Smith, who died unexpectedly July 25, was an independent journalist whose influence on our understanding of privacy – indeed, on the definition of the term – cannot be overstated. We didn’t know each other well, but I would see him perform in plays – I reviewed him in The Man From Earth – […]
Rhode Island filmmaker Denali Tiller directed a documentary named after three boys: Tre, Maison, Dasan. At the start of the film they are 13, 11, and 6 years old, and each has a parent (two fathers and one mother) incarcerated in the state prison, the Adult Correctional Institution in Cranston. The film is scheduled to […]
RIIFF programming director Shawn Quirk guided us through a selection of features and shorts. Opening night ceremonies on August 7 feature dedication of the 2018 festival to emerita professor Winifred Brownell “who was instrumental in creating the URI film program.” Short films are the “crème de la crème” of RIIFF, Quirk said, considering the Academy […]