Danielle Jackson

As Niela Orr looks at Black women characters in horror films like “Us,” “Ghost,” “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane,” and “Scream,” she uncovers a throughline: “Black women have been humiliated and punished, in horror cinema as in life, for our incisiveness, for wondering aloud, for trying to get some answers.”

John Jeremiah Sullivan’s profile of American folk singer, composer, and MacArthur Fellow Rihannon Giddens includes a history of the influential, but little known black antebellum fiddler Frank Johnson, as well as the 1898 racial massacre in Wilmington, North Carolina.

Vinson Cunningham profiles Tracy Morgan as the comic films the second season of his Jordan Peele-produced TBS show “The Last O.G.” and explores the complex audience dynamics of black comedy.

“Kingsley Hall was an experiment that is considered imperfect by all who took part in it, deeply flawed; to some on the outside, it was wildly irresponsible, perhaps a failure.”

Rachel Kushner profiles scholar and prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore.

Carina del Valle Schorske traces a lineage of Puerto Rican backup dancers in American entertainment from Rita Moreno to JLo.

“You can design your face for years, paint it like an artist, but in death they’ll mess up your makeup. Wipe off that garish mask with damp cotton balls. Redo my look: Shadow my eyes, gloss my lips, apply some highlights and shimmer. My face will be too thin, the skin stripped of glow; the […]

“I know that book collections become a pantomime of erudition, or a flex, as I often think when walking past the lit windows of tony brownstones in Brooklyn and catch sight of a large built-in bookcase. And yet when I have ever passed one without the tug of desire?”