A few days ago, an Uber driver I had on the way home from work told me that “The older you get, the more your doctor tells you to laugh—so I laugh a lot!” It was the eighteenth of June. I had learned earlier that the White House made Juneteenth a federal holiday, and, since […]
Reflections on My First Federally Recognized Juneteenth Read More »
What does it say about the state of American politics that over four months after the end of the previous presidential administration, which was panned internationally, brought for the first time ever to two separate impeachment trials, and overwhelmingly regarded as perhaps the most morally reprehensible, dishonest, illegitimate, and unintelligently managed four years in recent
The Conservative War Against History Read More »
In \”A Treatise on Pessimism\” from December, I said of a recent police murder: “The timing of this murder seems almost by design as if [the officer] and company wanted to reassure all who were drunk on the unrest and indignation that had become characteristic of 2020 that nothing had changed, and that he would
Happy, but Heedful Read More »
If Amanda Gorman is not the most famous poet in the United States right now, she is at least the most widely celebrated. The signs of this are virtually everywhere you look. Having been the first-ever National Youth Poet Laureate, a distinction she won in 2017 when she was only 19 years old, she was
Amanda Gorman: Radical or Remitting? Read More »
Donald Trump’s four years as president taught us many things. Very few of these things are fun to remember. We learned that a sitting president can hit the links during a national and global health crisis without repercussion. We learned that, with enough members of a particular party in the United States Senate, a president
How a White Nationalist Sold White Nationalism as Nationalism Read More »
Though Black biographical films are by no means a novelty, their number has grown considerably alongside the twenty-first century’s explosion of platforms for and interest in Black media. For many years now, they have thrust well-known Black historical figures into the spotlight and, sometimes, achieved blockbuster status. The mid 2010s, for example, saw the late,
Judas and the Black Biographical Film Read More »
The culture of African Americans is unlike any other. All at once, it has survived centuries of violent adversity, it is renowned for how powerfully it can channel both joy and sorrow, it has become so accustomed to sorrow that it regularly mocks it, and for a sizeable portion of American history (and sometimes today),
Ghetto White Kids and Hot Cheeto Girls Read More »
HBO’s new four-part miniseries Allen v. Farrow has been on thousands of minds since the first episode’s release last Sunday. The series, which features appearances from actress Mia Farrow and all but two of her children, revisits a decades-old, world-famous dispute between Farrow and filmmaker Woody Allen that began with Farrow and her adopted daughter
The Sooner the Better: Celebrity Offenses in the Digital Age Read More »
Say what you will about the historically calamitous presidency of Donald Trump, but we all must admit that he was able to accomplish something that none of his forty-four predecessors could: he proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that anybody can be the President of the United States. Trump, the first person to become
Trump: The Last Trump? Read More »
When President Biden and Vice President Harris were still campaigning for the offices they now hold, they often referred to the 2020 election as a “battle for the soul of the nation.” Their view, I suppose, was that the election was more or less a battle between the forces of good and evil, of equality
Anti-Asian Sentiment and the Soul of America Read More »
