VideoCreditCredit...More viewers tuned into watch Kendrick Lamar — 133.5 million people — than any other Super Bowl halftime show. And they witnessed a rousing concert by a 22-time Grammy-winning (as well as one Pulitzer-winning) artist. But there was much more on displaydzd777, if you knew where to look for it.
Mr. Lamar provided a layered spectacle of cultural and political allusions, encoded in and percolating through propulsive rap, 13 minutes of profound protest art that compelled me to shout gleefully at my TV in response to the audacity I was witnessing. With the multifaceted symbolism unspooling before me, I felt compelled to break down the brilliant complexities. Here’s my take:
The performance began with an aerial shot of the darkened football field illuminated by alternating symbols: a square, a circle, a triangle and an X.
ImageA scene from “Squid Game.”More than a few people noted the nod to the masks worn by the guards in the dystopian South Korean drama “Squid Game,” in which poor people compete against one another in a series of sadistic games. When I first saw the symbols I, along with many others, thought of the PlayStation controller buttons.
Both references point to one main conceit for Mr. Lamar’s premise: the gamification of the elusive American dream,fef777 casino which for too many of us has become the “dream deferred,” as in the Langston Hughes poem “Harlem.”
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Each semester, a new class of puppies arrives from Canine Companions, a nonprofit organization that trains service dogs. Over the course of 12 weeks, the dogs play games designed to assess their temperaments and cognitive abilities. The goal is to learn how to raise and identify dogs that can perform tasks like assisting children with disabilities or veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder.
The failure by three correction workers to offer aid was “an omission” that contributed to Mr. Nieves’s death, the New York attorney general’s office of special investigation found in a report published on Tuesday. But because Mr. Nieves might have died even had he received immediate medical help, the attorney general, Letitia James, said her office would not charge the workers criminally.
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