Chanda chamke

Every two weeks, Big Issues focuses on newly released comic books of significance. This week, they are Bloom, written by Kevin Panetta (Zodiac Starforce, WWE), with art by Savanna Ganucheau (George And Johnny, Fresh Romance), and Meal, written by Blue Delliquanti (O Human Star, Beyond) and Soleil Ho (San Francisco Chronicle, Racist Sandwich), with art by Delliquanti. These two graphic novels put food at the foundation of two queer romances, using cooking to drive the narratives in different ways. Food and romance are tightly linked. Dates often happen at restaurants, cooking a lavish meal for your partner is an act of affection, and major relationship milestones are celebrated with food. There’s intimacy in both cooking and eating, in sharing the experience of making and consuming dishes that nourish the body and stimulate the senses. Two new graphic novels, First Second’s Bloom and Iron Circus’ Meal, explore this intimacy through two very different … [Read more...] about Food is the catalyst for comic book romance in

First, it beat Star Wars: Rogue One. Now, for the second weekend since its wide-release debut, Hidden Figures—the true story of three black female mathematicians at NASA—is number one at the box office. It’s raked in roughly $6o million so far, and counting. The inspiring story of Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Vaughan has reenergized the ongoing conversation about the importance of inclusivity in STEM. Though we’ve long done away with the Jim Crow laws depicted in Hidden Figures, black women in are still notoriously underrepresented in mathematical sciences, including physics. A quick look at the numbers proves it: between 1973 and 2012, 22,172 white men received PhDs in physics. Only 66 black women did. Advertisement Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein was one of those women. In 2010, Prescod-Weinstein became the 63rd black American woman to ever earn a PhD in physics, from the Perimeter Institute at the University of Waterloo in Canada. Now, as a … [Read more...] about A Black Female Astrophysicist Explains Why