“In October of 2014, a white police officer fatally shot a black teenager on the streets of Chicago,” states the first line of 16 Shots’ description before expounding. Now almost 15 episodes in, the podcast (a collaboration between WBEZ Chicago and the Chicago Tribune) continues in that pattern, letting statements hit…

In Paris’s 4th arrondissement, two blocks from architectural oddity the Centre Pompidou (which wears its insides out), is the restaurant Dans Le Noir, a similarly strange establishment that houses an abyss. The concept eatery, with multiple locations worldwide, serves patrons in a pitch-black dining area.

History and its manipulation is the all-consuming center of Walter Mosley’s new genre-bending novel. The lessons of the past are not static to skillful interpreters, even if they are at best only partially understood. Yet presenting limited historical knowledge as irrefutable truth condemns many people to suffer…