Rebecca Bodenheimer

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...

Many misleading tropes about bisexual women, such as that they’re confused, deceptive or sexually voracious, were on full display.
When psychologist Dawn Hughes took the stand during the defamation trial initiated by Johnny Depp against his ex-wife Amber Heard, she testified to the court that Heard’s bisexuality was a point of contention during the actors’ tumultuous marriage. Hughes gave examples: Heard had “faced scrutiny” in her interactions with women and, on one occasion, Depp allegedly ...

Released in June 1997, 'Wyclef Jean Presents The Carnival' was both distinctly of its time and revolutionary in the way it employed Caribbean musical influences. GRAMMY.com revisits Jean's solo debut in For The Record.
Twenty-five years ago, on the heels of one of the most successful, critically beloved hip-hop albums of all time, the Fugees shocked the world by breaking up. The fallout from the romantic relationship between Lauryn Hill and Wyclef Jean was too much to bear, so the trio went t...

The Haitian Creole term potomitan has many meanings for the Martinique-born bassist, singer, and composer Sélène Saint-Aimé. In Haiti, it refers to the central pillar in a vodou temple, around which ceremonies are performed; but it’s also a metaphor for women’s roles: “the mother, who holds together the family and society,” says Saint-Aimé, “but who’s not respected as she should be.” For her, the term also applies to the core group of musicians with whom she collaborated on her second album o...

The early weeks of the pandemic marked a low point for my relationship with my son, who was almost 8 years old then. His school was abruptly closed, first for three weeks, then for the rest of the year. I worked from home and my husband was an essential worker who had to continue going to his workplace, so the burden of continuing some semblance of education for my son fell entirely on me. My son’s teacher offered no remote instruction — only packets of busy work. Many days, my son refused to...

The critically acclaimed FX series “Better Things” pays a visit to San Francisco in the sixth episode of its fifth and final season, but don’t expect to see much of the city.
The Los Angeles-based show, created by, directed by and starring Pamela Adlon and based on her life as a single mother of three daughters, follows working actor Sam Fox (Adlon) and her attempts to strike a balance between her career, raising three children — Max (Mikey Madison), Frankie (Hannah Alligood) and Duke (Olivia...

​ ​Amaru Tribe’s new album Between Two Worlds / Entre Dos Mundos is likely an allusion to the Melbourne-based trio’s hybrid identities: Oscar Jimenez and Katherine Gailer were born in Colombia and Cristian Saavedra hails from Chile. Both the name of the group—amaru is a highly revered, mythical two-headed serpent in Incan mythology—and its iconography reference indigenous culture, though the sounds are also thoroughly modern.

On last week's episode of "And Just Like That," the HBO Max reboot of "Sex and the City," Miranda Hobbes (played by Cynthia Nixon) blew up her marriage.
I could see it coming from a mile away, particularly after her steamy extramarital encounter a few episodes earlier with Che Diaz (Sara Ramirez) in Carrie Bradshaw's kitc...

June 26, 2020, was the day I went public with just how angry I was about my son’s school closing down for Covid, and my life hasn’t been the same since.

I had begun to sense a difference between my own feelings and those of my mom’s text group, which included nine of us whose kids had gone to preschool together since they were 2 years old; the kids were 8 at the time. These were the parents of my son’s closest friends. We even had a name for our group, the “mamigas”— as most of us were either...

During its first several seasons, Showtime’s “Dexter” (which ran from 2006 to 2013) was an audacious show that expanded the limits of the TV antihero by giving us a serial killer protagonist. In fact, it could be argued that Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall) caused far less harm than his antihero predecessors Tony Soprano or Vic Mackey, because he abided by a strict moral code: He only killed other serial killers.
The apotheosis of “Dexter” was season four, when he faced off against the “Trinit...

Since Gavin Newsom beat back the recall election by a landslide, there has been a lot of triumphalism about him in liberal and progressive circles. It’s very likely he’s paving the road for an eventual presidential run — despite his claims to the contrary — and that he’ll use his handling of the pandemic in the world’s fifth largest economy as proof of his efficacy as a leader.
But as a Californian and lifelong Democrat who voted against the recall, this celebration of Newsom glosses over a c...

High school has always been hard, but its challenges are now unprecedented. Peter Nicks’s new documentary, Homeroom, which began streaming on Hulu on August 12, follows a group of Oakland students as they move through their final chapter of high school. Their academic year began in 2019 before it was, of course, interrupted by the pandemic. Homeroom is the third in Nicks’s Oakland trilogy, which also includes documentaries on Highland Hospital (The Waiting Room) and Oakland’s police departmen...

The title of Madremonte, the debut album from Colombian duo Jaguar, is a nod to the folklore of their homeland. A counterpart to the more well-known Latin American mythical figures La Llorona or the chupacabra, Madremonte is said to be a jungle dweller, covered in leaves and moss, who can cause storms and flooding. As a protector of Mother Earth, she enacts vengeance on people who cause environmental destruction or steal land, and even on philandering husbands. The group’s name, Jaguar, also ...

A prolific composer, Álavarez contributed countless hits to the Cuban popular music canon. His last album with Adalberto Álvarez y su Son, the group he created in 1984, was released in 2018. The group performed up until the onset of the pandemic last year.
Álvarez was born on Nov. 22, 1948 in Havana “by accident” -- his parents were visiting the capital from Camagüey, a province in central Cuba, and returned there shortly after his birth. As a teen, he began his musical career as a singer but...