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City Lights: Diane Rehm Explores Medical Aid in Dying in When My Time Comes
No one wants to talk about death—about wills, power of attorney, advanced directives. Peabody-winning journalist Diane Rehm hopes her upcoming documentary When My Time Comes can help change that. She also hopes it can spark conversations about medical aid in dying (MAID), a practice that allows terminally ill patients to receive life-ending medications from their physicians if they meet certain criteria. Rehm’s When My Time Comes follows the 2014 death of her husband John, […]
City Lights: Is D.C. Statehood America’s Future?
A few years ago, the future for D.C. statehood looked grim, even though there are dozens of compelling reasons to make D.C. a state (we compiled 51 back in February). They range from more control over things like the D.C. National Guard and Superior Court filing fees to correcting an exclusion that is “nothing short of racist,” as 51 for 51 Campaign Director Stasha Rhodes told City Paper in January. […]
City Lights: Leave the Door Open at the DC Independent Film Festival
Leave the Door Open, a documentary in the 21st DC Independent Film Festival, addresses a fascinating piece of D.C. history that stretched from 1935 to 1944. In those years, Nesuhi and Ahmet Ertegun, two young sons of the Turkish ambassador, who were in love with jazz music, regularly began attending the Howard Theatre for live performances by Duke Ellington and others. At that time, public transportation, housing, and restaurants in most of the city were segregated and discriminated against Black people openly […]
City Lights: Guillermo Bert Explains His Encoded Textiles
In 2010, Los Angeles-based artist Guillermo Bert traveled to Chile for the first time since leaving the country decades earlier. While there, he worked with weavers from the indigenous Mapuche community to incorporate QR codes into traditional textile designs, an experience which transformed the mixed media artist’s bicultural perspective. The project evolved into Encoded Textiles, a collection of ten pieces whose codes link viewers to audio and video interviews […]
City Lights: Planet Word Offers Us Poems for the Pandemic
After the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, Planet Word’s Curator of Programming Rebecca Roberts thought no one would be in the mood for the museum’s poetry event scheduled for that night. It turned out to be well attended: “I didn’t realize how deeply people want to turn to poetry for wisdom and solace and comfort in times of trauma,” she says. So when Harvard literature professor Lisa New wrote an article about the role of poetry in processing the pandemic, Roberts realized there was an opportunity […]