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"This is America" is a music video released last Saturday by Donald Glover, AKA Childish Gambino. ...there's a lot to unpack about it. Other sources have covered to death this video, which felt to me less like a typical viral music video and more like an interpretive dance piece. With my background in psychology, I had a very specific reaction to it. It's the kind of video you have to watch at least a few times. Fortunately, that's made easy on the viewer since it's just as catchy and full of jaunty, fun dance moves as it is horrifying Kubrickian scenes representing everything from biblical signs of the apocalypse to the Rodney King beatings. The brilliance of the video comes from the fact that Gambino and his backup dancers spend most of the video distracting the audience from what's going on behind them, occasionally shocking us with gun violence and abrupt tempo changes. This can best be demonstrated by an experiment I first saw in a psych...

You know, I almost made this a regular review of "Black Panther." The reason I didn't do that is because I want to do what the creators of the Marvel Cinematic Universe's "Black Panther" did...I want to do something different. I want to explain why I believe that the fictional setting of "Black Panther" is the best fictional setting the MCU has ever created...even better than their other fictional setting based off of a rich source of human culture, Asgard. "Black Panther", by now I'm sure you've heard, is one of the most important contributions to modern film. It's a mainstream, big-budget, Hollywood production by Disney that was written by, directed by, and stars mostly black people. To take it one further, "Black Panther" spends a great deal of effort, especially in the first two acts, celebrating both contemporary and traditional African culture. Scores of shots throughout the movie include prominent, yet ...