Music

Music Review: Primordial Swamp Beat Live

Primordial Swamp Beat Live is an uplifting 20-minute-long live performance/invocation/kirtan dedicated to Lord Shiva by Jai Uttal and friends. The song was recorded live at Freight…

Books

Book Review: How Psychedelics Can Help Save the World

Stephen Gray has compiled an assortment of unique perspectives in this book, and there is uniform agreement about one thing: We are living through calamitous times, and conventiona…

Books

Book Review: Koshersoul

Reading Koshersoul can make you hungry—not just because it talks about food, but because it also discusses other nourishing aspects of life, including spirituality, community, belo…

Books

Book Review: Namwayut

Sometimes the path to peace is through a struggle with self. This was so for Chief Robert Joseph, a survivor of a residential school for Indigenous children in Canada. For him, t…

Books

Book Review: Know Justice, Know Peace

For decades, Deborah Threadgill Egerton has used the Enneagram, a well-known psychological assessment tool, to improve workplace dynamics. In Know Justice, Know Peace, her first bo…

Film

Film Review: A Sexplanation

Director Alex Liu opens his documentary with a quote from the actress Marlene Dietrich: “In America, sex is an obsession; in other parts of the world it’s a fact.” Over the followi…

Film

Film Review: We Burn Like This

When an angry man throws a beer bottle from his truck and yells “Go back to your own country!” at young roommates Rae (Madeleine Coghlan) and Chrissy (Devery Jacobs), it’s unclear …

Film

Film Review: Karmalink

Billed as a “Buddhist sci-fi mystery,” Jake Wachtel’s film follows two working-class Cambodian kids who, driven by dreams of a missing golden Buddha statue and a temple they’ve nev…

Film

Film Review: Costa Brava, Lebanon

Mounia Akl's film tackles an important and underdiscussed aspect of an important subject. How do you persist as people, as a family, when the world seems to be falling apart around…

Music

Music Review: Tiyo's Songs of Life

Tiyo Attallah Salah-El was born in 1932 in Pennsylvania. After serving as a tank operator in the Korean War, he played tenor saxophone at R&B clubs. He became involved in small-tim…

Music

Music Review: Home, Before and After

Regina Spektor's songs have always been quirky, insightful tales that mix the mundane with the marvelous. “Ghost of Corporate Future” from her 2004 album Soviet Kitsch follows a …

Film

Film Review: Royalty Free

Kevin MacLeod is a composer with more IMDB credits than John Williams, Ennio Morricone, and Jerry Goldsmith combined. You may not have heard his name but you’ve almost certainly he…