I have been a fan of Femi Adebayo for a long time and every time comparison comes up between who’s the better thespian between him and - you can guess - Odunlade Adekola, I never think twice before making my choice. It’s always the Law graduate. This gap becomes more obvious in the two films released by the two Nollywood giants in the space of 3 weeks. Adekola released Orisa to the cinemas on July 21st while Adebayo’s Netflix-powered Jagun Jagun became available for streaming on August 10th.

I’ve always thought that opposition to affirmative action wasn’t an inherently conservative position. People on the left have plenty of reason to criticize affirmative action. It’s a tool for elite class reproduction, one that dresses up economic inequality in the guise of egalitarianism. My guest this week, the journalist Jay Caspian Kang, seems to see it that way. He’s a man of the left who has written searching, deeply intelligent pieces about affirmative action (among many, many other subjects).

If you’re under 50, it’s likely that your first exposure to Joan Crawford was not by way of Crawford herself, but rather the camp-horror version of her played by Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest. The movie that redefined what it means to be “so bad it’s good,” it was based entirely on Christina Crawford’s memoirs about life with a superstar mother who abused her children for the crime of not constantly expressing gratitude.

When looking for Donne's Holy Sonnets for this, I discovered, according to the edition I found on gutenberg.org, there are two cycles called 'Holy Sonnets'. There is the set of 19 which includes 'Batter my heart' and 'Death be not proud', and a cycle of seven on the Incarnation of Christ, beginning with 'La Corona' and ending with 'Ascencion'. I noticed in the seven sonnet cycle, Donne uses a line structure like the Petrarchan sonnet, but a thought structure more like the Shakespearean with the final turn coming in the last couplet.

“Stoner’s colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of him rarely now; to the older ones, his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, and to the younger ones it is merely a sound which evokes no sense of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers.”             -John Williams, Stoner “And at once, I knew