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Retroview
The Radical Empathy of Do the Right Thing

More than 30 years later, Spike Lee’s classic resonates for its honest attention to interracial tensions, and its sad observation of how legitimate grievances can spiral out of control.

A Life Examined
The Political Education of a (White) Civil Rights Activist

In a new biography, David Lowe shows how Morris Abram, a leading light of the early civil rights movement, fell out of favor—and what his complex legacy might teach us today.

(Composite by Danielle Desjardins)
TAI Conversations
Arch Puddington: “There’s No Such Thing as Illiberal Democracy”

As Freedom House unveils its annual report on global freedom, democracy scholar Arch Puddington discusses growing threats to minority rights, the disappointment of India, and his own career advancing democracy and human rights.

Composite by Danielle Desjardins (clockwise from top left: The Irishman, Parasite, A Hidden Life)
Year In Review
The Top Ten Films of 2019

Amid all the tentpoles and remakes, some genuine cinematic imagination found its way onto screens large and small this year.

Bernardo Bellotto, “The Ruins of the Old Kreuzkirche in Dresden” (Wikimedia Commons)
Art & History
Dresden and the Invention of the Future

In the heartland of Saxony, stirrings of culture war and a crack-up in the consensus about the past.

TAI Conversations
A Century of European, German, and Jewish History

A 97-year-old literature scholar talks to TAI about Germany and the Jews, democracy and autocracy, and his never-ending love affair with fiction.

Star-Crossed Cultures
Cold War Kids

Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War is an ambivalent film: Though it makes no apologies for communism, its attitude toward the West feels decidedly bitter.

Wikimedia Commons
A Conversation with Vitaly Mansky
Witnessing Putin’s Rise

A leading Russian documentarian reflects on the events that brought Putin to power, in a new film that is part personal repentance and part cautionary tale.

2019 Predictions

Another year, another round of prognostication. TAI editors speculate about what 2019 has in store.

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At the Movies
The Death of the Auteur

Orson Welles’s final film, newly completed after four decades in limbo, is a fascinating paradox: a deeply personal but radically collaborative project, which speaks as much to our time as to his.

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