The Making Of Ta-Nehisi Coates

At the age of 41 (he turns 42 on Saturday), Mr. Coates has become one of the most influential black intellectuals of his generation, joining predecessors including Ms. Morrison, Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Dr. Cornel West. “He’s a rock star,” said Dr. Nell Irvin Painter, professor emeritus of American history at Princeton University, adding that Mr. Coates is asking questions that even “other historians have not been asking.”

With The Trump Presidency, Images Have Taken Public Art To New Levels

“The images spread as they do because, taken together, they can seem to reveal hidden truths about a president who remains, for all his spotlighting and swaggering, a cipher. This is an era, after all, in which the American public, primed with Making a Murderer and American Crime Story and NCIS, embraces forensic analysis as a form of entertainment. In that context, each new image of the president, and each image of the people and things surrounding him, takes on not only the quality of art—provocative, illustrative, asking to be analyzed—but also the quality of a mystery.”

Even Though He’s Stepping Down As Its Boss, Julio Bocca Wants Uruguay’s National Ballet To Be A World-Beater

The Ballet Nacional Sodre in Montevideo has been making strides and leaps (ahem) since the former international star, a native of neighboring Argentina, became director of the company in 2010. The announcement that he’s resigning as director made news in South America last month, but he’s not actually leaving the company: he’ll focus solely on training its dancers.