‘Michael Jackson’s Journey from Motown to Off the Wall’: Sundance Review

The first bars of “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” are among the most iconic sounds in 20th century pop — that teasing entry beat, those half-whispered StarsWars-esque opening lyrics (“The force, it’s got a lot of power”) and that signature falsetto “Woooh!” that uncorks a whole mess of infectious funk from the horns and percussion. Spike Lee takes us back to the first time we heard that classic in Michael Jackson‘s Journey From Motown to Off the Wall, which continues the director’s admirable bid to reclaim the legacy of an innovative artist whose genius was often unfairly overshadowed in his later years by tabloid attention.

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How to Construct the Ultimate Conspiracy Theory

Tim Powers is one of the foremost practitioners of thesecret history genre, in which real historical events are revealed to have surprising fictional explanations. And Powers—who was good friends with the ultimate master of paranoid sci-fi, Philip K. Dick—has developed a reliable system for spinning out elaborate new conspiracy theories. It starts with reading a lot of history and looking for unexplained facts that seem to be connected.

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