VIDEO REELS

A week of action in Atlanta this March showcases widespread opposition to a planned police training center, which would be the largest in the nation. An organizer explains what’s at stake. Atlanta is a city built inside a forest, one that Indigenous Muscogee people call the Weelaunee Forest. In recent years, the Atlanta Police Foundation, a private nonprofit organization, has led an effort to build what would be the nation’s largest police training center on hundreds of acres of that forest land. The move sparked the creation of a broad coalition to protest the project, some opposed to forest destruction and others against police expansion. Together, these organizers are calling on Atlanta’s mayor, Andre Dickens, and the city council to “Stop Cop City.” Authorities have cracked down on the...

The exhibition Seeing Loud: Basquiat and Music, currently running at the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts, demonstrates that the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, which is usually associated with painting, also calls upon other media, including music — the main theme of this exhibition — literature, comic strips, cinema and animation, a much lesser-known aspect of his work. Basquiat was born in New York in 1960 to a Haitian father and a mother of Puerto Rican descent. In the late 1970s, in collaboration with Al Diaz, he drew enigmatic graffiti under the pseudonym SAMO. The artist quickly made a name for himself in the New York art world (becoming friends with Andy Warhol and Madonna, among others). He then produced solo paintings and achieved international fame that continued to grow until his ...

In Boston, there are reports of people pronouncing the letter “r.” Down in Tennessee, people are noticing a lack of a Southern drawl. And Texans have long worried about losing their distinctive twang. Indeed, around the United States, communities are voicing a common anxiety: Are Americans losing their accents? The fear of accent loss often emerges within communities that face demographic and technological changes. But on an individual level “losing one’s accent” is also part of a profit-driven industry, with accent reduction services promising professional and personal benefits to clients who change their speech by ironing out any regionalisms or foreign pronunciations. Boston has one of the most famous – and often-parodied – American accents. But is it really possible to lose one’s acc...