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Nina Simone credited her friends of the black intelligentsia for facilitating her political education in the 1960s, offering a set of strategies for critical analysis of the cultural situation. Prominent among them were other socially engaged writers and dramatists: Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and Lorraine Hansberry. Significantly, these figures were outspoken critics of American racism whose literary and dramatic works reflected this critique. Of further importance is that Simone’s political tutors, like herself, brought to their works a sense of race complicated by gender difference, und

Who saw the global financial crisis coming, who didn't and who deserved blame for the forecasting failure? After a decade of debating these questions, I wonder whether we shouldn't be asking a different one: even if we had clearly seen the crisis coming, would it have made a difference? Perhaps - but perhaps not. Consider New Orleans in 2004. With a terrible hurricane bearing down on the city, officials realised that the situation was grim. The levees were in disrepair and a storm surge could flood the low-lying city. A hundred thousand residents would be unable to evacuate without help, and n

WHEN I WAS A KID, I wanted to design clothes. I kept a dollar-store sketchbook and a case full of pencils. At first, I used them to trace and color in the clothes I liked in magazines. Eventually, I learned to sketch them on my own, from memory. They were bad drawings, but I was too excited to care much about that. I knew where the buttons and ruffles were supposed to go, and that was all I needed. One of my friends, a girl who had been heavy for as long as I’d known her, who was often cruelly picked on in classes, asked if I’d design something for her. I told her yes. My clothes would be made