This week, we’re sharing stories from Chris Outcalt, Corie Brown, Daniel Immerwahr, Toniann Fernandez, and Karen Abbott.
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This week, we’re sharing stories from Chris Outcalt, Corie Brown, Daniel Immerwahr, Toniann Fernandez, and Karen Abbott.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…

Last month, Kendrick Lamar Duckworth won the Pulitzer Prize in music for his 2017 album DAMN. It’s the first work of hip-hop to be commended since the award for musical composition was created in 1943. Most winners have been classical musicians, and a few, like Wynton Marsalis and Ornette Coleman, composers of jazz.
The Pulitzer board noted that DAMN. “offers affecting vignettes capturing the complexity of modern African-American life.” The album’s selection updates and redefines conceptions of music and high culture — it is canon expanding and its reverberations and aftershocks should be significant.
DAMN. is Lamar’s third album, and while it is spectacular, I don’t think it’s his most thrilling. good kid m.A.A.d. city, from 2012, succeeds more on the plane of hip-hop aesthetics, with its structurally sound story arc. To Pimp a Butterfly, from 2015, was more melodically lush, and it magnetized a rising tide of political fervor: The single “Alright” became a protest anthem, and every major release by a popular black musician afterward seemed to form a politically-charged chorus.
Lamar has made a career of delivering prescient, complex work that is sometimes fiery and discordant, and other times deeply meditative or grief-stricken. But his work always feels honest. With the significance of his Pulitzer in sight, I offer a small selection of the insightful writing on Lamar that has published in the years since his debut.
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Jenny Aurthur | Longreads | May 2018 | 28 minutes (6,886 words)
On the Monday before Thanksgiving in 2004, my father went missing. I was at the Santa Monica apartment I’d been subletting to a friend while working for three months in New York City, getting ready for bed when my phone rang. It was my mother, wondering if I’d spoken to him. I had not seen or heard from my dad since he’d picked me up from the JetBlue terminal at the Long Beach Airport three days earlier. I was 30 and had returned home to L.A. from New York to spend the holiday with my family.
I’d never missed Turkey Day with my folks. Nothing about my childhood had been typical. I was raised by atheist, socialist activists who called me “Jenny Marx,” never just Jenny, after Karl Marx’s wife. They skipped religious holidays, but observed Thanksgiving, well, religiously.
Thanksgiving had solidified into a legendary event among our friends, and most years we had a full house. It wasn’t unusual for so many people to show up that some had to sit cross-legged on the floor, leaning against the living room wall. The food was so good, and the company even better, that no one minded not having a seat at the table. My father cooked for an army, and there was never a shortage of food. Our parties were lively and conversations were raucous, everyone talking over one another. We were an opinionated bunch. Current events were passionately discussed, and my parents were walking encyclopedias. Topics ranged from global warming to recent movies to the upcoming local and presidential elections. The musical selections were just as diverse as the crowd, from Dixieland jazz to gospel to classical to Dylan.
Everyone got quiet when the food was ready. We passed around two kinds of homemade stuffing — one for vegetarians and one with Italian sausage. Huge bowls of steaming sweet potatoes, buttery green beans, thick slices of light and dark meat my father carved from the 20-pound bird, fresh cranberry sauce with tart orange zest, loaves of freshly baked sourdough bread, green salad, and a ceramic pitcher of hot gravy barely fit on our dining room table.
***
I started having friends come over for the holiday when I was in junior high. My mother, Elinor, and my father, Jonathan, were popular with my classmates and considered the “cool parents.” During the years I was in school and well into my twenties, our house was the place to be. After Thanksgiving dinners with their own families, droves of my old pals showed up to our house. Everyone loved being around my parents. When I was in high school, one of my best friends, Leisa, was having trouble at home, and my mom took her in. Another friend, Ania, also lived with us a couple of years later.
“I wish Elinor and Jonathan were my parents,” my girlfriends would often say.
This year, though, Thanksgiving would be different. I’d been living in New York since the late summer. Preoccupied with my work, I put the holidays on the back burner. My parents and I had decided to keep it mellow for once. Eight years after my younger brother’s suicide, for the first time, it would just be the three of us.
***
Historically the kitchen was my father’s territory, and when I was growing up, my mother, my brother, Charley, and I were careful to stay out of his way. He loved being the king of his castle, but he pretended not to enjoy it. “I’ve been burning my ass over a hot stove for the last three days for you ingrates,” he complained, acting annoyed, wiping sweat from his forehead. He loved this yearly charade, and we went along with it, rolling our eyes and laughing.
The aromas coming from the forbidden room made our mouths water and stomachs growl impatiently. Under the pretense of being helpful, my mom, my brother, and I would wander into the kitchen and lurk over the stove and poke around. We were shooed out immediately. “Everyone out of the kitchen,” my dad said with mock exasperation. The table had been set for hours; that was my job. I pulled out and polished the prized Tiffany family silver that had belonged to my grandparents, for its once-a-year appearance. My mother was responsible for buying lilies and dahlias. She also designed beautiful Japanese-style flower arrangements that she’d made in her ikebana class. Charley was in charge of dusting and vacuuming. We liked a late dinner and by the time we ate at 8:00, we were famished.
“Now can I sit down?” my dad asked, drawing out the “now,” acting like an indentured servant finally getting a break. Collapsing into his chair with a dramatic sigh, he surveyed the bounty of food, enough for Henry VIII’s court. “Well,” he said, “if we don’t have enough we can always order pizza.”
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Do you love your Warby Parker glasses? Do you love how you never had to leave the house to find the right style of frames for your face? I do, and I actually love leaving the house. At Inc., Tom Foster examines how the direct to consumer (or DTC) movement started, and talks with some of the entrepreneurs trying to tap the market.
Many new DTC startups are hatched by digital natives at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, which educated such innovators as Elon Musk and Warby Parker’s co-founders. The list of product categories that entrepreneurs are trying to give the Warby Parker treatment is enormous: bras, sofas, napkins, and razors. Like everything in the capitalist jungle, not all of these companies will survive. But the ones who become the next Warby Parker, now worth $1.75 billion, could become tomorrow’s legends at Wharton.
The appeal of the DTC movement goes like this: By selling directly to consumers online, you can avoid exorbitant retail markups and therefore afford to offer some combination of better design, quality, service, and lower prices because you’ve cut out the middleman. By connecting directly with consumers online, you can also better control your messages to them and, in turn, gather data about their purchase behavior, thereby enabling you to build a smarter product engine. If you do this while developing an “authentic” brand─-one that stands for something more than selling stuff─you can effectively steal the future out from under giant legacy corporations. There are now an estimated 400-plus DTC startups that have collectively raised some $3 billion in venture capital since 2012.
If Wharton has become the spiritual center of the DTC startup movement, David Bell is its guru. A tall and tousle-haired Kiwi who comes off more like an edgy creative director than a professor, Bell has advised the founders of and invested in most of the DTC startups with Wharton roots. An expert in digital marketing and e-commerce, Bell first got a taste for investing when Jet.com founder Marc Lore (another Wharton alum, now at Walmart) invited him to put early money into his first startup, Diapers.com. When the Warby Parker founders were still in school and conceiving their company, the professor helped them refine its home-try-on program, arguably the key to getting people to purchase glasses online.

Accompanied by intimate portraits of birds and their owners by photographer Miisha Nash, for Topic, bird enthusiast Karen Abbott recalls her beloved, quirky, slightly devious African gray parrot, Poe, who passed away of heart failure at the very young parrot age of 18.
I have never wanted children, but I’ve always wanted birds—a realization that dawned in December 1997 in the unlikeliest of places: Las Vegas’s MGM Grand casino, where my husband and I were celebrating our first wedding anniversary. One afternoon, in between rounds of $5 blackjack, I wandered to a lobby and discovered a long perch supporting a dozen parrots—scarlet and hyacinth macaws, eclectuses and lilac-crowned Amazons among them—riotous bursts of red and blue and yellow and green, a preening, chirping string of jewels. I’d owned birds since childhood, a succession of mild, low-maintenance parakeets, beginning with a pastel beauty named Jake who rested on the wire rim of my 1980s orthodontic headgear. But parrots were different beasts, exotic and unpredictable. And some breeds have a life span of 60 to 80 years. A parrot, I thought, could outlive us both.
I had promised my husband I would look but not buy. We were 24 years old, had just bought our first house, and owed a combined $100,000 in student loans. The bird cost $1,500, not counting cage, formula, and toys, and required a nonrefundable $500 deposit. I lifted her close to my face. Struggling, she managed to pry one obsidian eye fully open and met my gaze. I named her Poe, after the writer.

With the cinematic Marvel Universe expanding at a seemingly exponential rate, historian Daniel Immerwahr‘s essay in n+1 takes a step back to look at the evolution of superheroes: they used to stick up for the underdog and actively work for justice, and there was a lot of Nazi-punching. Now, they fight villains who look a whole heck of a lot like themselves, and their main function is protection (at least, for the dudely superheroes; Wonder Woman remains an exception). And looking at this shift teaches us a lot about U.S. attitudes toward war and peace.
What these heroes are fighting, in the end, is themselves. And in doing so, they’re channeling a cultural ambivalence regarding the weapons of today’s wars. Iron Man intervening in global affairs is good, but Iron Monger (the villain of the first film) doing so is bad. The world needs SHIELD but fears HYDRA. It’s as if the films can’t put forth a hero to protect society without immediately imagining how he might threaten it.
Often, the lines blur. “Hey Cap, how do we know the good guys from the bad guys?” one of the Avengers asks, as he tries to sort HYDRA from SHIELD. “If they’re shooting at you, they’re bad,” is Captain America’s less-than-conclusive answer. It’s a quick joke but a meaningful one, because it gets at the central, uncomfortable truth about life in the United States that these movies dance around. The good guys—surveilling everyone’s communications, calling down air strikes, fortifying themselves against the world—look an awful lot like bad guys.

At the Washington Post, Louisa Loveluck and Suzan Haidamous report on how a bid for freedom from government oppression in Syria ended in torture — physical torture, and for one young mother, the anguish of not knowing whether her husband is dead or alive.
She remembers only flashes. Omar screaming as they beat his head and stomach with an iron bar. Blood everywhere, but Omar telling them nothing. Her mouth so dry she could barely swallow. Then an officer stepped forward and placed a small, cold knife to her pregnant belly. Omar’s swollen face froze.
“He told them everything. He gave up his friends’ names,” Marwa said. “Then they pulled him from the room and asked me to leave.” The interrogation was over.
Marwa gave birth to her second son, Youssef, in Lebanon. She had refused to leave the house when the first contractions began, inconsolable at the thought of giving birth without Omar. But time dulled her fear, and as the curly-haired newborn grew, she learned day by day what it meant to live as a refugee and a single parent, one of hundreds of thousands scattered by the conflict, not knowing whether jailed loved ones had survived.

Frances Leech | Longreads | May 2018 | 13 minutes (3,315 words)
I have friends in Paris who are now 4 and 6 years old. When I ring the doorbell at their apartment, I hear a clamor of footsteps and shouts of “Frances” and “Frances-madeleine” as they fight to open the latch, just within reach of small arms.
“What did you bring?” asks the boy, searching me for a telltale tin or box.
“Tu es une PATISSERIE,” says the girl: you’re a bakery, or a baked good. I do not correct her.
Then they remember: “bonjour,” “bonsoir,” a kiss on the cheek. They pull me away like tugboats to see their room. At one birthday party they kidnapped me so fast that the adults did not find me for half an hour. I was busy being dive-bombed by toddlers and pretending to be the wolf.
They are curious about many things: trains, love, my cat whom they have not yet met, all of the cooking that happens in their narrow kitchen. They know if they ask “what is it?” they will receive un petit bout: a morsel of chocolate or a scrap of herbed fat, something to test for themselves. Or someone tall will hoist the child up to watch bubbling sugar turn to caramel — from a safe distance — before chasing them out. “Go play with your kitchen!” They have a wide selection of plastic fruit, vegetables, pizza, cakes.
“What did you bring?”
This particular afternoon I only brought a pan. I showed it to them.
“Can you guess what we are making today? It begins with an M…”
“MACARONS!” The boy loves them, for their melting sweetness and array of colors. Whenever I make a butterfly or flower in pastel colors, I save one for him.
“No, it begins with an M and it’s also in my name.”
“MARIE!”
“No, that is maman. It looks like a shell but you can eat it.”
I find madeleines are often bland rather than exceptional, whether it’s the spongy ones in supermarket packets or the pâtisserie ones that are prettier than they taste. I’d rather dip a boring digestive biscuit in my tea and know what I am getting. I’d rather be named after an éclair. But I will make madeleines for these two French children. I can’t resist their big eyes and round cheeks, and neither can their local baker’s wife: she always slips them a chouquette or a little cake when their parents pop in to buy bread.

Alice Driver | Longreads | May 2018 | 11 minutes (2,616 words)
“Welcome to the Democratic Dictatorship of Myanmar,” said a slight, young woman on the street in Yangon, Myanmar. She was referencing the number of journalists in the country who had been threatened or jailed by the theoretically democratic government. Yangon is tangled roots and the shade of 100-year-old trees; it is the sound of hundreds of wings flapping as young men feed pigeons, their feathers flashing golden in the early-morning light; it is journalists imprisoned for speaking truth to power.
***
When I arrived in Yangon in January 2018, Reuters journalists Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo had been in prison for a little over a month. Much had changed since I had lived in the city in 2006, volunteering at an international high school with my best friend Tien, both of us living at a government-run hotel and eating Hershey’s chocolate bars out of her suitcase.
In 2015, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi and her party, the National League for Democracy, swept elections, and both citizens and the international community had high hopes that she would support press freedom. At a press conference a few days before the election, Suu Kyi referenced a “communications revolution” as millions of citizens watched her via Facebook, which at that time also promised to be a beacon for democracy. Facebook arrived in Myanmar in 2011, and since that time has racked up at least 14 million users, 93% of whom accessed it on their mobile phones.
In a country where burgeoning press freedom and the appearance of Facebook coincided, media literacy has proved a challenge. During my time there in 2006, I helped students apply to colleges in the United States and Australia — basically anywhere outside of Myanmar, which at that time had a dysfunctional university system. One of the students I worked with ended up attending Berea College, my alma mater in Kentucky, which I had encouraged her to apply to since they provide funding to low-income students. Yangon University, which was once Myanmar’s most famous university, reopened for the first time in two decades in 2013. Between the lack of independent media and the lack of access to higher education during the years before the democratic opening, it didn’t surprise me that media literacy was low.

Kanye West’s emergence from his self-imposed cocoon of social media silence last week has not been seamless. After proclaiming his support for Donald Trump and the president’s Make America Great Again plank, the musician and fashion designer took to TMZ Live on Tuesday for arguably the most bizarre of what has already been a bizarre fortnight of proclamations:
“When you hear about slavery for 400 years. For 400 years?! That sounds like a choice. You was there for 400 years and it’s all of y’all. It’s like we’re mentally in prison. I like the word ‘prison’ because ‘slavery’ goes too direct to the idea of blacks. Slavery is to blacks as the Holocaust is to Jews. Prison is something that unites as one race, blacks and whites, that we’re the human race.”
Kanye is well aware of the weight his words carry. As someone who has referred to himself as the “most impactful artist of our generation,” Kanye long ago realized that anything he says, no matter how inane and obviously ridiculous, will be incessantly discussed. For Kanye to then make such an ignorant proclamation is willfully disingenuous. And his follow-up tweets (now deleted) didn’t help to clarify his position:


The latter tweet references William Lynch, a purported 18th-century slave owner from the British West Indies who traveled to Virginia in 1712 to teach slave owners how to better control their property. His speech on the banks of the James River was first “discovered” in 1970, and began its life online starting in 1993 when a reference librarian at the University of Missouri-Kansas City uploaded the “Willie Lynch letter,” which detailed how Lynch psychologically and physically tortured slaves. The letter is also patently false.
Willie Lynch never existed, nor did anyone from the British West Indies organize such a summit to advise slave owners in the early 1700s. As the librarian mentions in an email to her superiors, “Prof. [William] Piersen of Fisk contacted us a few months back about its origins and provided me with a critique which points to the narrative being a much-latter-day document…assuming Prof. Pierson’s [sic] critique is on target, I think it likely that it’s a ’60s or ’70s document.”
I accessed this email via the Wayback Machine, which means it has existed to dispel the Lynch rumor for years. Yet the letter continues to be legitimized within the framework of pop culture. Kanye isn’t the only artist to name-drop Lynch: So has Talib Kweli, Lupe Fiasco, Kendrick Lamar, and Nas among others.
And it’s not just rappers dotting bars with reference to Lynch’s “letter,” Denzel Washington quotes the letter at length in the 2007 film The Great Debaters.
The letter, and its supposed relevance explaining not only the slave experience but also the origins of “lynching,” has been disseminated enough times that in 2004 Jelani Cobb wrote an extended answer to the question, “Is Willie Lynch’s letter real?”
There are many problems with this document — not the least of which is the fact that it is absolutely fake…it has been cited by countless college students and a black member of the House of Representatives, along the way becoming the essential verbal footnote in barbershop analysis of what’s wrong with black people.
When Mark Adams of the Baltimore Sun contacted the publisher of the St. Louis Black Pages in 1998 — the newspaper that first printed Lynch’s speech in the early 1990s — to inquire about the provenance or authenticity of the letter, Adams was rebuffed. “I’ve never run a piece that got the response this one got. There’s something truly magical about it. Don’t ask me to explain it,” said publisher Howard Denson. “How else can you explain how whites kept control when they were outnumbered five, 10 or 20 to one?” he asked. “Blacks still carry the negative mental legacy of slavery. I think we really need to address the things that hold us back. Blacks spend $400 million annually, but they believe they’re poor and powerless because they’ve been conditioned to think that way.”
Even though the letter is fake and Willie Lynch is a conjuring from the civil right era, that is not to say the character doesn’t have power. As Lupe Fiasco noted via Twitter:
Lynch’s letter shouldn’t be downplayed, but it also shouldn’t be given the sort of weight that a work of historical significance carries, and perhaps a search down a Willie Lynch rabbit hole with lead to other examples that provide a far greater historical context, whether that be Solomon Northup, When I Was A Slave, or Cudjo Lewis.
Willie Lynch is an urban myth, and while the internet is full of stories that we know to be false, we’ve known for more than two decades that there was no Willie Lynch, so why keep spreading the lie to only fit a convenient narrative? For Kanye to willfully ignore what has been proven untrue is perhaps more dangerous than his support of MAGA and his “brother,” Donald Trump.
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