From Paradise Lost to Harry Potter, Fanfiction Writers Reimagine the Classics

Though Derided by Critics as Copycat Art, It’s a Democratic Form of Crowdsourced Creativity

As Game of Thrones looks to its eighth season, the show—strictly speaking—is no longer filming the books of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. Of course, it is still using the characters, world, and settings that Martin established (though its sometimes-drastic departures from the source material have been the cause of controversy before). But as the show has passed the timeline covered in the published novels, it is writing its own narrative without the need to reference a pre-existing canon. The biggest franchise on television has become, …

Dancing in New Orleans to Overcome Division

A Crescent City Transplant Creates a Diverse Non-Profit, and Finds a New Home

Five years ago, I moved from New York to New Orleans. The reasons included a need to escape from the New York grind, a lover’s terminal brain cancer, and a …

A Mexican Cultural Center That Builds Bridges, Not Walls, With the U.S.

Tijuana’s CECUT Draws Southern Californians by Programming with Cross-Border Appeal

Each culture absorbs elements of cultures near and far, but afterward it is characterized by the way in which it incorporates those elements.
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Rescuing the Vanishing Sounds of Central America’s Garifuna People

In Tiny Belize, Old and Young Artists Unite to Reclaim a Musical Heritage

What reggae is to Jamaica and samba is to Brazil, Garifuna music is to my country of Belize, a small Central American nation wedged between Guatemala and Mexico.
 
This …