If you liked Lily Gladstone in Killers of the Flower Moon, you'll love her in this new movie about a Seneca-Cayuga woman named Jax who hits the road with her niece, Roki, on a wrenching mission. Jax's sister has gone missing, and if the pair can't find her quickly, the same authorities who should be helping them could take Roki away. Gladstone gets more to play here than she did in her Oscar-nominated role. Isabel DeRoy-Olson co-stars. Friday, June 28, Apple TV+.

by Questlove

"Nobody knows more about hip-hop, and perhaps popular music in general, than Ahmir 'Questlove' Thompson," said Dorian Lynskey in The Guardian. Born in 1971, two years before the birth of hip-hop itself, the Roots drummer has become "the Ken Burns of Black music," a prolific author, DJ, and producer who has explored the subject as a writer, podcast host, and musical ringleader. His latest book arrives just after Drake and Kendrick Lamar engaged in a widely followed exchange of diss tracks that inspired the author to declare hip-hop "truly dead." But "in Questlove's analysis, hip-hop is an eternal cycle of death and rebirth," and Hip-Hop Is History should satisfy any reader equipped with a bit of prior knowledge about the music. "It's a wonderful ride, colored by personal digressions and crisp observations." 

The book is "really a tale of two halves," said Brandon Yu in the San Francisco Chronicle. After briefly revisiting the birth of hip-hop, at a 1973 Bronx rec-room party, Questlove recalls being electrified by hearing the genre's first hit, "Rapper's Delight," in 1979, and eventually becoming a participant in what he considers the golden age of hip-hop. The late 1980s and early 1990s spawned his artistic lodestars — Public Enemy, De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest — while most of the music that's come since the East Coast/West Coast feud that led to the late-1990s murders of Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G. has run counter to his sense of the genre's core purpose and values. Because the book charts Questlove's changing understanding of the music, "underground artists like J-Live get about as much coverage as Jay-Z." That's part of its charm. 

In the end, Questlove makes "a convincing case" that hip-hop as an art form has run its course in some important ways, said G'Ra Asim in The Washington Post. "So much of hip-hop is a reflection of pain, even the joyful parts," he writes, noting that the practice of using existing records to generate new music emerged in Black communities where musical instruments were scarce. He also breaks the genre's history into five-year periods in which he says the sound of the music corresponded with whatever drug — crack, weed, ecstasy, etc. — Black Americans were using to soothe their pain. To close the book, he imagines looking back on the same history from 2073, with hip-hop firmly dead, but only because it's no longer needed. In that way, "Questlove dares us to choose, for once, to love Black people over Black culture."

The civil rights icon who taught nonviolence

Pastor, teacher, and activist, James Lawson was, in the words of his friend and colleague Martin Luther King Jr., "the greatest teacher of nonviolence in America." He never wavered in his commitment to pacifism, through the bomb threats he weathered as a Freedom Rider to the beating he endured at the hands of police in Selma, Ala. When, during one pivotal 1960 Nashville sit-in, a white motorcyclist spat on him, Lawson politely asked for a handkerchief and then stunned his assailant by striking up a conversation about motorbikes with him. An unyielding commitment to nonviolence, he believed, was the only way to shock America's conscience. "Chances are," he said, "without people being hurt, we cannot solve the problem." 

Born to a gun-toting Methodist preacher and a Jamaican-born seamstress, Lawson "did not always practice nonviolence," said the Los Angeles Times. As a 10-year-old in Massillon, Ohio, he once smacked a white boy for calling him the N-word. "Jimmy," his mother reproached him, "what good did that do? There must be a better way." Her words would inform his worldview: Lawson spent 13 months in prison for refusing to serve in the Korean War, then traveled to India in 1953 to study the teachings of Gandhi. News of the Montgomery bus boycott prompted his return, and King recruited him to join the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Lawson became King's "chief strategist," said The Times (U.K.), leading workshops, boycotts, and freedom rides. He taught activists ways to minimize being hurt as well as how to curb a natural instinct to fight back, telling them to expect beatings, even broken bones. In 1968, Lawson invited King to speak to striking sanitation workers in Memphis, where King would be killed. Lawson would later officiate the prison wedding for James Earl Ray — in part because he doubted Ray's sole culpability in the assassination, but also because, he said, "I knew if Martin were alive and in my position, he would have married them." 

Lawson moved to Los Angeles in 1974, where he served as pastor of a Methodist church for 25 years, said NPR.org. He continued his activism "well into his 90s," advocating for gay rights and immigrant rights and embracing the Black Lives Matter movement. "There are too few people in our country who are pushing nonviolent struggle," he said in January. "We need, in the United States, thousands and thousands of small and large campaigns of nonviolent wrestling with our country."