“Our cultures are not dead and our civilizations have not been destroyed. Our present tense is evolving as rapidly and creatively as everyone else’s.”
Story
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Feature, Nonfiction, Story
Traveling While Black Across the Atlantic Ocean
Following in the footsteps of African Americans traveling to Denmark in the early 20th century, Ethelene Whitmire experiences a 21st century transatlantic crossing.
Posted inArts & Culture, Nonfiction, Story
When Black Male Singers Were Sex Symbols
Teddy Pendergrass was the R&B singer women wanted and who men wanted to be. And the one whose life-sized cardboard cutout stood in one family’s living room.
Posted inArts & Culture, Crime, Current Events, Essays & Criticism, Story
True Crime and the Trash Balance
True crime has a reputation for being trashy, but a recent renaissance has it tipping into advocacy.
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Feature, Nonfiction, Story
The Gift Economy
In the desert at Burning Man, Joanne Solomon dissects the implicit transaction that defines her cross-cultural love affair.
Posted inArts & Culture, Nonfiction, Story
Fruitland
Privately made records enjoy a cult following among collectors, but few are as legendary as Donnie and Joe Emerson’s 1979 LP Dreamin’ Wild.
Posted inArts & Culture, Commentary, Culture, Current Events, Story
Theatre of Wokeness
Are we having a surface-level reckoning?
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story, Writing
Sam Lipsyte on ‘Mental Archery,’ the Quest for Certainty, and Where All the Money Went
“It’s difficult to say what you really think. You’re too aware of the traps, the dead ends, the cul-de-sacs of utterance: all the ways we let cliché steer us in a certain direction, force us to say not quite what we mean…”
Posted inArts & Culture, Books, Essays & Criticism, Feature, Nonfiction, Story
Of Blackness and ‘Beauty’
At an art exhibit exploring black models through Western art, Morgan Jerkins finds historical evidence of the white supremacist definitions of beauty Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom identifies in ‘Thick: and Other Essays.’
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Story, Unapologetic Women
The Silence of Women
Women who spoke too angrily or too publicly were punished in cruel and unusual ways.