Blake Maddux

Music Interview: Juliana Hatfield Talks About “Blood”

May 14, 2021
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In her new album, Juliana Hatfield’s concerns are comeuppance, self-abasement, and the depravity of those who revel in the power to make decisions that can adversely affect others.

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Music Interview: Rickie Lee Jones on her Memoir and Living in the Present Tense

May 11, 2021
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“Then, as now, my focus was on the songs. As long as you can keep your focus on the art that you’re doing, the larger thing it can serve – selling records or whatever – that’ll happen on its own.”

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Music Interview: Guitarist and Singer-Songwriter Richard Thompson on His Memoir, “Beeswing”

April 16, 2021
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“I really thought that I could sustain a life in music, but perhaps I’d end up in Las Vegas backing Tom Jones or something.”

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Author Interview: Kevin Mattson on a Genuine Culture War — Punks versus Reagan

March 20, 2021
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The real culture war in 1980s America was waged by young people who were trying to create their own culture and jealously rejected corporate culture along the way.

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Author Interview: Talking to Jamal Greene about How Our Demand for Rights Went So Wrong

March 17, 2021
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“‘Rightsism’ gives judges much more power than they deserve in a democracy,” Jamal Greene writes. “When U.S. judges face a conflict of rights, they cancel one right or the other.”

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Book Interview: Talking to BrownMark about “Life in the Purple Kingdom”

September 19, 2020
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Front and center in this memoir are BrownMark’s efforts to reconcile his resentment and gratitude toward the man who both sold him short and afforded him the “opportunity of a lifetime.”

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Book Review: “American Radicals” — Unrecognized Champions of 19th-Century Protest

July 9, 2020
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American Radicals is as revealing, riveting, and well-researched as any work of history that I have read in recent years.

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Author Interview: Peniel E. Joseph on “The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.”

June 5, 2020
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“Malcolm X and MLK evolved over time and came to converge in surprising ways. Malcolm’s movement for radical black dignity became a global human rights touchstone in a manner that made King’s struggle for radical black citizenship both necessary and more expansive.”

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Book Interview: Heather Cox Richardson on “How the South Won the Civil War”

May 25, 2020
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“Politics is driven by language, and America’s peculiar history has given oligarchs the language to undercut democracy.”

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Author Interview: Jared Ross Hardesty on “Slavery in New England” — More Pervasive Than You Thought

February 3, 2020
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“The idea that slavery was not economically important to New England as a whole is just emphatically not true.”

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