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A photo from the TV series The Underground Railroad shows a large group of escaped slaves in period costume
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From Pivot Magazine

Pivot recommends: What to read and watch right now

A series based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, a podcast that tackles historical events miscast in the public imagination, and more

A photo from the TV series The Underground Railroad shows a large group of escaped slaves in period costumeAmazon Prime’s 10-part series The Underground Railroad imagines the route to freedom as a literal underground rail system

WATCH

Amazon Prime’s series, The Underground Railroad, is based on Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2016 novel. The 10-part series, directed by Academy Award winner Barry Jenkins, imagines a world in which the Underground Railroad is a literal underground rail system that transports southern slaves to freedom. It stars newcomer Thuso Mbedu as a slave who escapes a Georgia plantation and Joel Edgerton as a bounty hunter committed to hunting her down.

READ

Bestselling author and speaker Greg McKeown argues that not everything has to be hard. In fact, that’s the guiding ethos of his book Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most. It offers actionable advice for simplifying essential activities, allowing people to achieve the results they’re seeking without burning out. If McKeown’s recommendations were widely adopted, there might come a day where there’s little distinction between working hard and hardly working.

LISTEN

Hosted by journalists Michael Hobbes and Sarah Marshall, each weekly episode of the podcast You’re Wrong About tackles a specific historical event they say has been miscast in the public imagination. Topics run the gamut from Yoko Ono supposedly breaking up the Beatles, the Challenger disaster and Janet Jackson’s infamous Super Bowl “wardrobe malfunction.”