Starting next month, the cost of renouncing your U.S. citizenship will go down dramatically - a boon for people already shouldering the burden of paying for a major overseas move. Anyone wishing to formally shed their American citizenship is required to obtain a form called a Certificate of Loss of Nationality, and right now it comes with a whopping $2,350 fee. In April, that fee will drop by 80% to $450.
I used to think I was over my startup failure. That was three years ago, ancient history, right? Yet every time I pitched a new idea to someone, my hands would shake. Every investor meeting felt like walking into that same room where I had to tell my team we were shutting down. My body remembered what my mind tried to forget. That's when Bruce Springsteen's words hit me like a freight train: "The past is never the past. It is always present. And you'd better reckon with it in your life and in your daily experience, or it will get you. It will get you really bad."
They all follow the rule of 'only take one,' and you can rehide other shines you find. The entire city turns into a collective scavenger hunt for roughly a month, and it's common to see packs of humans hunting in the rain and snow, even at night with flashlights. In this small corner of the world, tucked into the armpit of the PNW, someone decided
These ghosts of our nation drove overdose deaths to record highs during the pandemic. More than 100,000 Americans ODed in a 12-month period ending in April 2021, up almost 30 percent from the prior year. The majority of these deaths of despair, about 70 percent, were among men between the ages of 25 and 54, men who should be creating or influencing or building cars or welding high steel.
First, they take up It Was Just an Accident, the Cannes Palme d'Or-winning film by Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi. Inspired in part by Panahi's own experience being imprisoned for critiquing the Iranian government, his new film-made in secret from the regime- holds back little in its sharp political critique, rage, and... a surprising amount of comedy. Not surprising in its amount of comedy- but maybe in its frequently anti-authoritarian politics-is Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!
A sprawling tale of two Singapores, the short documentary Sandcastles draws connections between Singapore, Michigan - a 19th-century ghost town swallowed by sand following widespread deforestation - and the island country of Singapore, where rapid development and land reclamation has, for decades, been enabled by the importation of sand. More poetic exploration than call to action, the work surveys waterways, cycles of development and the transient nature of sand - deceptively sturdy over short timescales but, over decades, quite volatile.
One political conversation with a gay friend that I'll never forget occurred the night before Election Day in 2016, where my friend told me that he hoped Donald Trump would win so that "The Revolution" would finally happen. The idea, I suppose, was that Trump would make things so bad that it would finally wake up the proletariat of the world, and it would unite in the ultimate class war to overthrow the messed-up liberal world order,
Video of the fatal incident Saturday showed Pretti facing off with federal agents holding an iPhone then being thrown to the ground and beaten by around six or seven men. A first shot is then fired before at least nine more and Pretti falls still. It is not clear from the footage which agent fired the first shot, or the ones that ultimately killed Pretti.
He sings the names of the dead haltingly, as though he is reading them off a screen-which, judging from the recording-studio footage in the song's lyric video, he probably is. The song is about the news, but it is also, perhaps unintentionally, about the moment of lag when we absorb the names and images, when we try to assimilate atrocity into narrative.
Rows of field laborers hacking at sugar cane with machetes. Workers in harnesses dangling from power poles as lights strobe, then black out. The man who's arguably the biggest global pop star today weaving among them, rapping, singing, dancing, and interacting with tableaux of daily life and social issues from his Puerto Rican homeland and its diaspora. Not to mention the whole hemisphere's troubled relationship with the U.S. of A.
