The Believer

“At exactly 1:05pm, the Prius was outside my Airbnb, as was Chuck, in a pressed white shirt and pastel turquoise shorts. He treated me to a tuna sandwich at a nearby bakery. We then drove back and sat down for three hours of conversation in the secluded bamboo-walled yard, which happened to be right next to where he attends his AA meetings.”

“I didn’t know how to write about my sister’s death—so I had AI do it for me.”

“I see rehearsal space, rehearsal tapes, dressing rooms, cooking sessions, woodsheds, after-hours performances, and backstage as Black sacred spaces, places where we are most like ourselves.”

An immersive theatrical performance reveals a side of Ciudad Juárez rarely seen by outsiders.

“Can we fall in love completely without completely losing ourselves?”

“I don’t want my part to get skipped over, but I still don’t know how to write directly about what went down between me and M. All I can do is worry a detail like an R&B singer worries a line…For years I’ve cherished a clip of Smokey Robinson and Aretha Franklin singing on Soul Train.”

“So much of my work as a writer and editor is to make sure that Black people have the ability to write about more than just moments like the one we’re in right now, and a big disheartening thing for me has been to live through this moment and again see editors scrambling to get Black writers to write and then undoubtedly those same editors will vanish when those Black writers want to write about, I don’t know, ice cream or whatever the fuck”

“In the recordings of the Voice-O-Graph, two collectors discover an intimate sonic history.”

The stray thoughts of a scattered reader.

Amanda Fortini suggests that Las Vegas is deep and interesting, and a pretty decent place to live, if you care to meet people and look closely, beyond the glittering lure of unbridled debauchery on the Vegas strip.