century

Born into an African American family with a grim history of enslavement, Marian Anderson was determined from an early age to master the art of singing for the concert hall. A contralto of great range and warmth, Anderson’s abundant gifts as a performer of spirituals, arias and German Leider brought her global fame even as she endured the indignities of racial discrimination at home. Her Easter Sunday performance at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939 in front of 75,000 spectators remains a touchstone of defiance in an age of racial violence.

Anthony Tommasini’s excellent biography of Anderson, “Voice of A Century,” reclaims the singer as a great artist who only embraced her power as a symbol of racial equality much later in life. I spoke with Tommasini about Anderson, Franz Schubert and Albert Einstein.

✍️ Author Chat

Anthony Tommasini’s biography reclaims Anderson as a great artist who embraced her power as a symbol of racial equality later in life.

(Ahna Tessler Photography)

I feel like people know Marian Anderson in the abstract, but they regard her as a symbol rather than an artist. And among the virtues of your book is that you reestablish Anderson’s legacy as a great singer and performer.

She was a contralto, which is the lowest female vocal register. But that register had such resonance, and she had complete control over it. She also had enormous range; the uncanny, beautiful thing about Anderson’s voice is that when she started ascending even into the soprano sphere, she held those notes so beautifully. They were emanating from below, grounded in that low voice. It made for a mesmerizing sound. I’ve made a playlist to accompany the book.

She embodied this kind of fierce dignity and grace in the face of racial discrimination. But as you point out, she was reluctant to make herself a symbol of the civil rights movement, preferring to let audiences focus on her artistry.

In 1939, she was banned from performing in Washington’s Constitution Hall because of her race, and her manager, with help from Eleanor Roosevelt, arranged a performance in front of the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday. Yet, the night before the performance, she was trying to get out of it. She felt the whole affair had turned into a civil rights demonstration. When it came time to write her memoirs in 1956, she wanted to excise the event from the book. She felt that what she could do is be an example of excellence and possibility for aspiring black artists.

She did play to segregated audiences, even long after she had become a national star.

[This type of segregated performance featured what] was called vertical seating. But she refused to forsake her career, which she had worked so hard to attain, and so she played these segregated shows. Eventually, there was a performance in Virginia which was boycotted, and that sort of broke the trend. She then performed in front of an integrated audience in Florida.

There is an encounter with Albert Einstein, of all people, who counsels her to take a stand against these racist booking policies.

In 1937, she showed up for a concert in Princeton, New Jersey, only to discover she was being refused a room at the Nassau Inn. As it turns out, she had a friend in Princeton who had seen her at Carnegie Hall and had meekly gone backstage to meet her. This was Albert Einstein, who was teaching at Princeton University at the time, and who offered to put Anderson up for the night at his house. He really pressed her on being more outspoken on racial equality.

Anderson played Europe multiple times in the 1930s, right before the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich. As you write, German audiences were blown away by Anderson’s mastery of their music, specifically Franz Schubert’s Lieder, or art songs, which were among Anderson’s most beloved repertoire.

So extraordinary, right? She also made two tours of the Soviet Union during that time. They went crazy for her in the Scandinavian countries, as well. But for the German audiences who are so nationalistic about their Leider, it was confusing. They couldn’t imagine how a Black American woman could sing their music so beautifully.

Anderson was the first Black soloist to perform at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, in Verdi’s opera Un ballo in maschera.

That was really a huge risk and a huge leap for her. She wasn’t a trained opera singer, and she had to dig deep into that material. She was already 58 by that time. There is a radio recording of the performance. There’s this dignity, like she’s calling upon this power. It’s exhausting and it’s draining, but it’s also exhilarating.

This Q&A was edited for length and clarity.

📰 The Week(s) in Books

Book jacket for “Body Language” by Meg Howrey

(Los Angeles Times illustration; jacket from Doubleday)

Marlon James has published his highly anticipated new novel “The Disappearers,” a sprawling story about gay culture in ’80s Jamaica, and Mark Athitakis is quite taken with it. “James is … determined to unwind the cliches of gay fiction: the tragic victim, the heartwarming gestures of solidarity, the blunt porniness,” he writes. “Mere survival will have to be enough for most of these characters; the sense of fear is pervasive, but so is a determination to work through it.”

What’s it like to be the primary dissenting liberal voice on Fox News? Stephen Battaglio found out when he talked to Jesssica Tarlov about her hybrid memoir and self-help book “I Disagree.” “I have a good amount of shyness to me,” she tells Battaglio. “I have a lot of imposter syndrome. I’m constantly in wonder that I ended up getting to do this and that hopefully, am the right person to do it.”

Meg Howrey’s fifth novel, “Body Language,” a twisted family saga, is “smart, sardonic and powerful,” according to Meredith Maran.

Finally, Emily Wilson, the classicist who has been a lightning rod of controversy over her disparaging remarks in regard to the film version of “The Odyssey,” is going to translate Homer’s epic for a second time, reports Emily St. Martin.

📖 Bookstore Faves

The Hammer Museum’s gift shop is one of the best art book shops in L.A.

(Eric Petschek)

Sure, the Hammer Museum’s gift shop stocks the requisite art-themed mugs, tea towels and tchotchkes, but it’s also one of the best art book shops in L.A. Inside the sleekly designed Hammer Store is a vast inventory of monographs, children’s books and critical texts about modern and contemporary art. In an email exchange, store managers Sara Beattie and Brooke Berlin tell us what museumgoers are buying right now.

Hammer’s store is really the best museum bookshop in L.A. How do you decide what to put on the shelves?

We’re an eclectic bunch of book nerds and love the written word. We start by looking at upcoming programming, exhibitions and the season, and we buy accordingly. And we have a great team that gives us suggestions. We’ve learned to trust our instincts. The Hammer is an experimental institution, and we approach our buying in that spirit.

Do you have patrons that are not necessarily there to check out museum exhibits?

Of course! We’re not only a museum, but a cultural center, which means there’s always something happening — like mindful meditation on Thursdays, or family programming on weekends, or people coming in just to enjoy a meal at Lulu.

What kinds of books tend to do well for you?

Art monographs, especially on contemporary or Los Angeles artists; books about living more conscientiously; and everyone loves a children’s book (even if it’s just to heal your inner child). We love finding unique books that can’t be found elsewhere. Whenever we can, we work with small presses and book distributors. They often make books that can only fully be enjoyed or understood by seeing them in person.

Is there any particular title that is presently selling well?

“Mindfulness in the Garden: Zen Tools for Digging in the Dirt” by Zachiah Murray; Sanzu Wada’s “Vol. 1 Dictionary for Color Combinations”; “The Hippest Trip in America: By Land, Air and Sea” by Alake Shilling.

Why do we still enjoy art books, when we can look at millions of paintings and sculptures on the internet?

Why go outside if you can look through a window? There is a lot of talk of people returning to the analog or physical media, and that includes renewed interest in physical books. BookTok is huge. People love talking about books and showing off their special deluxe book editions on TikTok. Art books by their very nature are deluxe, image filled and thoughtfully designed. A well-produced book is an art object in itself. Nothing beats the experience of paging through a beautiful book. That experience can’t be replicated on a screen.

The Hammer Museum store is located at 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles.

Leopardus tilcayo is the first new living cat species named and described in more than a century.

A tiny wild cat that lives in Bolivia’s lush cloud forests has been identified as a previously unknown species, marking the first time in more than a century that a new living feline species has been formally named and described.

Called “tilcayo” by local communities, the cat is part of a group called tiger cats, which are found across much of South America.

It was discovered in the Yungas forest, a mountainous region where forests are often covered by clouds and surrounded by high humidity, according to the researchers.

Given the scientific name Leopardus tilcayo, the cat measures 46cm (18 inches) long and weighs about 1.4kg (3 pounds), making it smaller than an average domestic cat.

“Its fur is light brown … with irregularly shaped rosettes across its body,” according to Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz, a National Geographic Explorer and one of the authors of the study describing the newly identified species published on Thursday in the journal Current Biology.

Little is known about the cat’s biology and lifestyle. Remains of small rodents in scat samples suggest they may form part of its diet, while camera-trap evidence indicates it could be more active at night, Nogales-Ascarrunz said.

Tiger cats are so-called cryptic species, meaning they cannot easily be distinguished merely by appearance, evolutionary biologist and study co-lead author Jonas Lescroart of the University of Antwerp in Belgium said.

Observing the Bolivian cat drew interest because “its characteristics did not match the descriptions, most of them based on Brazilian cats”, Nogales-Ascarrunz said. “This made us wonder, what tiger cat do we actually have in Bolivia?”

The team analysed DNA from 38 cats sampled across several South American countries, including eight museum specimens. The study found that tiger cats are in fact five genetically distinct species.

“We never expected this Bolivian tiger cat to be a separate species, and no one had ever proposed it as a different animal, subspecies or otherwise,” Jonas Lescroart said.

Genetic analysis suggested that the tilcayo lineage separated from other tiger cats about 1.4 million years ago.

The research team also described a new tiger cat subspecies in Peru’s Yungas, naming it Leopardus tigrinus antisuyo, after Antisuyu, the region of the old Inca Empire that included the area it inhabits.

EMPORIA, Kan. — Adam Hamilton has spent decades trying to bring people to Jesus as founder of the nation’s largest United Methodist church. Now he wants to bring Kansas voters to the polls as the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate.

A first-time candidate, Hamilton faces an unusual balancing act between political ambition and spiritual obligation. His pastoral role has given him rare prominence for a Democrat in a state where Republicans have won every Senate race for nearly a century, and some in his party are hoping for an upset victory over incumbent Sen. Roger Marshall.

But conservatives are also trying to use Hamilton’s religious leadership against him. They suggest that his sermons prove he’s too liberal for Kansas or even that he’s a heretic for suggesting that non-Christians have a path to salvation after death.

Marshall said in an interview that Hamilton is “too woke for Kansas.”

Hamilton isn’t turning the other cheek. If Jesus were standing before them now, he said, “Roger Marshall would call him ‘woke.’”

Only a few ordained ministers have served as senators over the past 100 years and just one — current Democrat Raphael Warnock of Georgia — remained an active pastor. If elected, Hamilton plans to continue as senior pastor at his Church of the Resurrection in the Kansas City area, preaching 12 to 18 times a year.

As Hamilton tries to win over center-right churchgoers as well as secular liberals, he’s promising that he wouldn’t use his perch in Washington to evangelize. He’s on unpaid leave, going 11 weeks without giving a sermon this summer, although he peppers his remarks with biblical references, discusses Jesus’ teachings with voters and spends several hours weekly on pastoral duties such as hospital visits.

“I need that interaction with people and the caring for people,” he said after a meet-and-greet at a coffee shop in Emporia, a university town of 24,000 that’s smaller than his congregation 110 miles to the northwest.

Hamilton brings skills that built a huge church to a tough race

Hamilton, 61, built his church from a few members meeting in a funeral home chapel in 1990 into a 25,000-member congregation with nine locations across the Kansas City area. He’s demonstrated an ability to raise money and has gained national attention by writing more than 30 books, mostly on Christian theology.

Hamilton describes himself as a centrist, running partly on “bringing people together.” His congregation, he notes, is nearly evenly split between Democrats, Republicans and independents.

Republican-leaning Kansas has a sizable bloc of moderate voters, protects abortion rights and regularly elects Democratic governors. But Democrats haven’t come within 10 points of winning a Senate race in more than 50 years, and they haven’t won one since 1932.

Marshall, 66, is focused on rallying rural conservatives, a strategy that perennially works for Republicans. A fifth-generation farm kid who became an obstetrician, the senator is fluent in agriculture policy. He jibed that suburbanite Hamilton “doesn’t know a heifer from a steer.”

Marshall also warned that the Senate could fall under Democratic control if Hamilton wins the race.

“His party is too crazy for Kansas,” Marshall said.

The campaign has included an allegation of heresy

This year’s race is unusual because of attacks from the Christian right branding Hamilton a heretic.

At issue is a 2022 sermon, reposted on X after Hamilton won the Democratic primary in August. Hamilton cited New Testament passages to argue that non-Christians can receive “the saving grace of Jesus” after death, avoiding eternal torment in Hell.

Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas declared that Hamilton had rejected “the central tenets of Christianity,” quoting a verse in the Gospel of John where Jesus declares, “No one comes to the Father except through me.”

Marshall thanked Cruz for raising the issue, suggesting the sermon was “one of hundreds” of examples of Hamilton being out of step with Kansans.

Hamilton acknowledged that some Christians agree with Cruz — but cited other prominent Christians who might share his own view, including Methodist founder John Wesley and “Chronicles of Narnia” author C.S. Lewis.

“If he’s going to call me a heretic, he’s not the first,” Hamilton said. “He won’t be the last.”

Hamilton seeks to reassure voters wary of church-state mix

Hamilton also has faced skepticism from Democrats wary of mixing government with religion.

Republican conservatives routinely highlight their faith, suggesting that God wanted them to seek office and profusely thank God after winning.

This year during Lent — the 40 days of self-reflection and repentance before Easter — Hamilton said he skipped a meal each day and prayed about entering the Senate race.

“I’m never 100% sure about the will of God, so I tell people I am 87.2% sure I am supposed to be doing this,” he said. “The Kansas voters will decide whether I’m supposed to win, but I feel like I was being called to step into the arena.”

In Emporia, Hamilton said that as a senator, he’d “fight for the rights of all people, whether they have any faith or not.”

“I’m not running for the Senate to make everybody in this country Christian or United Methodist,” he said.

Nolan Guyer, a 72-year-old Navy veteran and retired nuclear plant operator, said he initially worried about voting for a minister, but Hamilton won him over enough that he donated to the pastor’s campaign.

“I don’t think it’s the government’s business to teach morals, and that is a preacher’s job,” Guyer said.

Some familiar issues are prominent

Republican political action committees have attacked Hamilton as so radical on climate change that he urged his congregation to repent for eating beef. They base that allegation on a misleading stitching together of two parts of a 2020 sermon, with one clip showing Hamilton calling Christians “to repentance” for not protecting God’s creation and a second, earlier clip of him saying that “maybe changing your diet” is among personal actions that could reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Another ad claimed that Hamilton’s church helped pay for a drag queen story hour for children — a claim his campaign denies.

Marshall blamed Hamilton for a split in the United Methodist Church over allowing LGBTQ+ clergy, something it did in 2024. While Hamilton did support that change — at least since 2019 — he also had worked to prevent a split by backing a plan for a local option on whether to ordain or marry LGBTQ+ people.

Hamilton said his views on human sexuality and same-sex marriage evolved gradually, as he came to know gay and lesbian people in his congregation. His church now has a Queer Inclusive Collective ministry and participates in Pride events.

“One small part of my ministry has been trying to make sure that people who felt alienated from the church and pushed away knew that Christ welcomed them and they were loved by our congregation,” Hamilton said.

Hamilton’s watchwords include ‘decency’ and ‘affordability’

One of Hamilton’s assertions, that he is “running on decency,” resonated with Jann Briggs. She’s a retired teacher from Reading, a small town where the Methodist church is across the street from the Miracle Cafe.

Briggs and several friends came to Hamilton’s event in Emporia with a copy of his latest book, “Holy Spirit: God’s Presence and Power at Work in Us.” He signed it for them.

“Finally, somebody who’s speaking the right words,” Briggs said.

Hamilton is also focusing on affordability, a key issue for Democrats this year. He has criticized Republican cuts to federal programs for the poor, such as food assistance and Medicaid coverage.

“I just want to know, when did it become ‘woke’ to care for your neighbor?” he asked.

Hanna writes for the Associated Press.