(These are excerpts—click on the title to view the whole piece!)
 

Vedant Gupta reviews...
 

Best of the Best
Directed by Lena Khan

The film's greatest strength is how honestly it captures the microculture of South Asian competitive dance teams. While I haven't experienced this firsthand (as my team has been very close-knit), I've witnessed similar dynamics on my friends' high school and college Bollywood dance teams. Peers often weigh traits unrelated to dance ability when building choreographies, coordinating leads and visuals, or even deciding who makes it past auditions. Physical attractiveness in particular often creates these toxic environments, where pretty privilege determines who shines in the spotlight and who gets left behind, especially with South Asian girls.
 

Ann Skea reviews...
 

The Night Parrots
by Stephen Orr

The Night Parrots is and is not Benjamin "Benno" Gerlach's book, but elderly Benno's memories are. Orr has based them on the actual 19-day journey across the Australian Western Desert from Hermannsburg to Horseshoe Bend, taken by the Lutheran pastor Carl Strehlow and his family in 1922, and later recorded by Strehlow's son, Theo (Ted). As remembered by Orr's elderly Benno, this journey is "real but not real," "imagined" and "factual." It is also vivid, immersive storytelling..
 

Fables and Lies
by Elisabeth Storrs

The horrors in this book are not easy to read or to read about. But the insight it offers into the lives of ordinary people who have grown up in, and are controlled by, a dictatorship in which they are taught and trained to believe fables and lies raises questions about such control in our own lives and those of others around the world..
 

Being: Why It's Harder to Be Human than a Hamster or a Herring
by Rachel E. Menzies and Ross G. Menzies

There is much to think about in this book. And much to argue about, too.