Rebecca Bodenheimer

Twenty years ago, reggaeton was well on its way to becoming the sound of urban Cuba. The 1990s had belonged to timba, a polyrhythmic, driving style of contemporary salsa known for its humor and social commentary. In the 2000s, Puerto Rican-inspired reggaeton began to overtake timba’s popularity, especially among the youth, with artists like Eddy K, Elvis Manuel, El Micha, Los 4, and of course Gente de Zona ushering in the era of Cubatón, as Cuban reggaeton is sometimes called.
Roughly a decad...

Twenty years ago, Lost revolutionized television with its nonlinear storytelling, unfurling a narrative via flashbacks, flash-forwards, and even flash-sidewayses. But all of those innovations would have rung hollow if it hadn’t also given viewers some of the most memorable, complex characters in TV history.
In the fall of 2004, audiences watched with rapt attention as Dr....

“I felt too fat to be a feminist in public.”
The startling admission appears in the opening paragraph of Kate Manne’s new book, Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia. With that single frank and sobering sentence, Manne, an associate professor of philosophy at Cornell, captures the pervasiveness of anti-fat bias—and its stifling impact.
Manne had tapped into the zeitgeist of #MeToo with her 2017 book, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, and was frequently called upon by the press to comment on curr...

The film challenges perceptions of fatness while highlighting the personal struggles and triumphs of Aubrey Gordon. At The Roxie on May 14.
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By Rebecca Bodenheimer
Jeanie Finlay’s new documentary Your Fat Friend — released last year and playing at the Roxie Theater on May 14— opens with images of its subject, Aubrey Gordon, bathing in a bucolic hot spring in the Pacific Northwest. The camera travels over her ample body, lingering on its curves and rolls.
In a voice-over, Gordon directs the ...

The culture wars have been heating up in recent years, along with deep political polarization in the United States, and language has been one of the primary arenas of battle. The increased visibility and demands for equity and inclusion by marginalized groups—including BIPOC and the LGBTQIA+ community—have been met with a backlash that often centers on the terms these groups use to identify themselves.

On her first three albums, most recently 2019’s Sonocardiogram, Cuban-born singer Daymé Arocena displayed a mastery of global fusion, drawing connections between Afro-Cuban folkloric music and progressive jazz. Appropriately for an album named after the Yoruba word for alchemy, Alkemi heralds another creative transformation in the form of a pivot to pop that, as she told the New York Times, was over a decade in the making, a delay owed not to creative hang-ups, but...

2023 has seen countless tributes to hip-hop, celebrating both its golden anniversary and the staying power of a genre that was vilified, underestimated, and branded a passing fad for decades. Nonetheless, while 50 is a major milestone, many believe hip-hop reached its peak decades ago.
At the tail end of the golden age of ...

Once a marginalized genre associated with lewdness and criminality — much like the genres from which it draws so much influence, dancehall and hip-hop — reggaeton is now firmly in the mainstream. While dominant across Latin America in the new millennium, reggaeton has made huge inroads with English-speaking audiences in the past decade, particularly with crossover hits like "Bailando," "Despacito," and numerous Bad Bunny songs from the past three years.

Two hundred years ago, Thomas Jefferson, co-author of the Declaration of Independence, expressed a desire to make the island of Cuba part of the territory of the United States. Albert J. Beveridge, a senator from Indiana, reproduced Jefferson’s words in a 1901 article: “Her [Cuba’s] addition to our confederacy is exactly what is wanting to advance our power as a nation to the point of its utmost interest.’” However, it was John Quincy Adams, then secretary of state to President James Monroe, ...

Released 25 years ago on June 16, Ozomatli updated Latin fusion for the 1990s. Their distinctly Angeleno blend of Latin genres with hip-hop, funk and reggaeset the pace for a lengthy career with a devoted following.
The opening track from Ozomatli’s 1998 self-titled debut album immediately sets the tone for the group’s musical voraciousness. "Como Ves" is awash with the sounds of urban Los Angeles — car traffic, a radio playing, a dog barking — and Brazilian ba...

Critics have long debated whether the HBO show “Succession,” created by Jesse Armstrong and concluding its run on Sunday, is fundamentally a drama or a comedy. In its earlier episodes, the comedic and satirical elements were what...

Going into this year’s Oscars, I had a bad feeling that the Academy voters would give Best Actor to Brendan Fraser. Fraser was nominated for The Whale, a movie that many critics have characterized as a deeply harmful portrayal of a fat person. When he did end up winning the award, the whole room stood up to congratulate him. As I watched at home, I looked around at the audience on-screen and saw a sea of thin people—who likely have no idea what it’s like to be fat—vigorously applauding a non-...

Forty years after its release, Culture Club's 'Kissing To Be Clever' is a study in optimism, Caribbean influence in pop and the power of image on MTV.
The "second British invasion" was well underway in the U.S. when Culture Club’s debut album, Kissing To Be Clever, was released in late 1982. In Britain, punk had given way to new wave, synth pop, and the androgynous-leaning New Romantic fashion movement, pioneered by David Bowie and Roxy Music. Musically, groups like the Police and the Clash w...

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By Kaitlin Fontana
One of the abiding strengths of HBO's Barry—a dark comedy series about a hitman who, after tracking a mark to an acting class, decides he wants to be an actor himself—is that it has never taken policing all that seriously. From the jump, its cop characters have fallen somewhere on a spectrum of goofy dummies to hapl...

On April 18, one of Cuba’s most prominent musicians, José Luis Cortés, died suddenly at the age of 70 after suffering a stroke. Known by his nickname, “El Tosco” (“the rough guy”), Cortés founded the dance band NG La Banda, one of the pioneers of the Cuban salsa style called timba, the most popular genre on the island from the late 1980s to the mid-aughts.
But Cortés was also known for his machismo, both in his music and life. In 2019, Dianelys Alfonso, known as “La Diosa” (“the goddess”)—a s...