The countdown to yet another Oscars ceremony has begun. And so has begun my annual exercise of watching each and every nominated movie before the toll of the bell. As the year before was a little too busy for me, I am obviously glued to my headphones even during office hours this year to compensate for it.
While the next ten minutes of Needulling might make a dent in my cut throat schedule to binge on remaining 21 movies in the next 17 days, I couldn’t help but share some details about the last movie I’ve just finished watching. Even though not as magical as the crowd favourite La La Land, Hidden Figures might be this year’s surprise winner. The Hollywood trend of filming heartwarming biographical tales continues with this energetic story about an all-girls team of African-American mathematicians who played a key role during the early years of NASA. And as usual, after the movie, I was forced to Google out the truth so that I can weed out ‘cinematic liberties’.
Today’s Needull, a book extract from The Guardian, gives you a glimpse of the debut non-fiction book by Margot Lee Shetterly– Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race – on which this fabulous movie was based on. While critics might call it an ‘Affirmative Action’ blockbuster (I can’t deny that), this heart touching and effortlessly fluid extract will give you a feel of exactly why this movie works.
But before a computer became an inanimate object, and before Mission Control landed in Houston; before Sputnik changed the course of history, and before the Naca became Nasa; before the supreme court case Brown v Board of Education of Topeka established that separate was in fact not equal, and before the poetry of Martin Luther King Jr’s “I have a dream” speech rang out over the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Langley’s West Computers were helping America dominate aeronautics, space research and computer technology, carving out a place for themselves as female mathematicians who were also black, black mathematicians who were also female.
Amazon link to purchase the book
Bonus Video Needull: YouTube Montage – Every Best Picture. Ever. – Burger Fiction
Needull in a haystack 
