We debate about the southern border without knowing a lot about what life there looks like. In this documentary, young filmmaker Robie Flores copes with the death of a brother by returning to the small Southwest Texas border town where they grew up and trying to capture the complex interplay of Mexican and U.S. culture that shaped their lives and those of their neighbors. Monday, Feb. 10, at 10 p.m., PBS; check local listings.

by Imani Perry

“Like the color blue, Imani Perry’s Black in Blues is vast, multifaceted, and enchanting,” said Michael Kleber-Diggs in The Minnesota Star Tribune. For years, the National Book Award–winning author of South to America has been gathering notes about the world’s favorite color and why it has proven particularly compelling for Black people. Blending memoir and history, she writes about the blue ceiling in her grandmother’s house, about blues music, and about the West Africa indigo-­dyeing techniques that crossed the Atlantic with the slave trade and fueled explosive growth in the enslavement of Black people in the 18th-­century American South Calling Perry’s book a collection of essays on blue, though, “feels too small.” As I read it, taking in “1,000 amazing facts about blue,” I gained insights about the world as well as reaffirmation that holding fast to beauty is the essence of living well. 

“Who knew there were this many shades of blue, this many blue resonances?” said Becca Rothfeld in The Washington Post. Early on, Perry ties her meditations on the idea of blue to the idea of Blackness. “I have an intuitive sense of what it means to be ‘Black,’” Perry writes. “But when I have tried to use my scholarly training to offer accounts of how and why we are this thing, my descriptions feel distorting.” Every color, after all, has infinite manifestations, and yet each manifestation “bears an ineffable relation to the phenomenon as a whole.” Capturing the way that multiple iterations of a color comprise a unity requires a poetic mode of writing, and Perry delivers. “Black in Blues is clearly a learned work—it is full of archival gems—but it is also a lyrical one.” 

“Its chapters are tide pools: quite short, but deep and teeming,” said Alexandra Jacobs in The New York Times. “Blew” was the descriptor that the English used for dark-skinned people during the Middle Ages. Blue periwinkle flowers decorated the otherwise unmarked graves of Black people who died in slavery. George Washington Carver, that hero of Black American history, invented a valuable formula for Egyptian blue pigment. Nowhere, though, is blue more clearly inextricable from the Black experience than in the musical genre that evolved from spirituals and is named after the color. Early on, Perry evokes a bluesy 1929 Fats Waller song and promises to answer a question its lyrics pose: “What did I do to be so black and blue?” Her answer is heartening, said Glenn C. Altschuler in the Florida Courier. The blues routinely transform suffering into an affirmation of life and love, she tells us, and the music’s majesty emanates from Black Americans’ shared appreciation and lived experience of the beauty of that act.

The political scion who fought for abortion

Cecile Richards never gave up a fight. Already an experienced political operative when she became head of Planned Parenthood in 2006, she saw immediately that the organization—which offers women’s health services, including in some clinics abortion—had become a right-wing target, and she rallied progressive support. Over 12 years, she expanded the group’s donor and volunteer base from 3 million to 11 million, raising more money than the group had ever received. When anti-abortion activists falsely accused Planned Parenthood of selling fetal tissue in 2015, she defended the organization in a heated, hours-long congressional hearing. And when Donald Trump was elected the following year on a promise to get Roe v. Wade overturned, Richards put a pint of Haagen-Dazs on her desk. “I’m going to have this one thing of ice cream,” she told a colleague, “and then I’m getting back to work.” Within two years, she’d added a record 700,000 more donors to Planned Parenthood’s rolls. 

“Her political involvement began early,” said The Guardian, not surprising with a father who was a civil rights attorney and a mother who was Ann Richards, Texas’ charismatic Democratic governor. Born in Waco, Cecile Richards was disciplined at age 13 for protesting the Vietnam War at school; at 16, she was a campaign volunteer. After graduating from Brown University, she married a labor organizer and became one herself, and in 1990, while pregnant with twins, she joined her mother on the gubernatorial campaign trail. “Struck by the religious right’s rising power,” Cecile then entered politics, too, eventually becoming deputy chief of staff to Nancy Pelosi. At Planned Parenthood, she “spent much of her tenure under siege,” said The Wall Street Journal. That intensified when she revealed in 2014 that she’d once had an abortion. And it “reached a crescendo” in 2015, when an anti-abortion group released secretly recorded, deceptively edited videos of Planned Parenthood employees ostensibly discussing profiting off fetal tissue. Before Congress, Richards denied the “outrageous claims,” though she apologized for the staffers’ tone. 

Richards “stayed active” after stepping down in 2018, said The Washington Post. She co-founded a political action group to promote what she called a “women’s new deal,” and after Roe was overturned in 2022, she started a chatbot to assist abortion seekers. Even after her 2023 diagnosis with brain cancer, she continued to promote abortion access. “There are no permanent wins and no permanent losses,” she said. “We have to fight for every inch of progress.”