The evolution of local guy Mark Wahlberg has been an intriguing process, starting as a troubled Dorchester gangbanger and winding up a filmmaker whose work – his latest is “Father Stu” – serves as a reflection of his faith.

By now, everyone has seen or heard about Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars for joking about his wife’s short hair – the result of alopecia, an autoimmune disease. As shocking as Smith’s slap was, so too are the mixed reactions to the assault within the Black female community, who either praised or condemned his violence.

Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s “Everything Everywhere All at Once” is an absurdist multiverse overload, but the directors are bummed when science fiction is just a plot point that doesn’t ask big questions – such as “How do you find each other and truly see each other, when there’s so many things trying to pull us away from each other?”

Gannett – the 900-pound gorilla of multinationals in the local news space – announced last week that it was eliminating many of its Massachusetts news properties and merging others including the Somerville Journal with the Medford Transcript. It’s doubtlessly a last, brief flash in the proverbial pan before elimination by a profit-focused corporate parent.

While many African American women today wear their hair in afros, cornrows, locks, braids, Senegalese twists, wraps, or bald, our hair continues to be a battlefield in this country’s politics of hair and beauty aesthetics.

Russia’s Ukraine invasion helps the world see what our inhumanity toward each other looks like, and highlights the persistence of a global racist social order even in a humanitarian crisis.

Conversations about race in America are our third rail. It trips us all up. Whoopi Goldberg proved it when she empathically stated the Holocaust was not about race on the television talk show “The View.”

The MBTA Transit Police pays $178,190 annually to Supt. Richard Sullivan to serve as a media representative who does not take questions from the media, even as people keep dying on MBTA property.

The first issue of The Left Bank of the Charles Review arrived with the new year, promised quarterly by Joseph Levendusky – a traveler, lover of music, left-leaning political critic and sitter in cafés.

This coronavirus edition of movies to shelter with includes some highlights of the art streaming at the “Brattlelite,” the antihero classic “Cool Hand Luke” and a bunch of others, including a Liam Neeson misfire, a pretty weepie and some sci-fi curiosities.