Mississippi: A Poem, In Days
“I am more successful than I’ve ever imagined. Yet, I am terrified of sleeping because my body no longer knows how to dream. I know that people die in their dreams. I am not afraid of death. I am afraid of being killed while dreaming. Driving while Black. Jogging while Black. Dreaming while Black. Fighting while Black. Loving while Black. I wonder if movement, mobility, love are the features of Black life the worst of white Americans most despise.”
The Life Breonna Taylor Lived, in the Words of Her Mother
“She started walking early—like at nine months, so she was just a little person early. I always say she had an old soul. She liked listening to the blues with my mother. She would sing me the blues. It was hilarious. She used to sing ‘Last Two Dollars.’ That was her song.”
How Kinfolk Magazine Defined the Millennial Aesthetic…and Unraveled Behind the Scenes
The Big Bitcoin Heist
Think of it like Ocean’s 11, but in Iceland and with cryptocurrency.
Ten Years Ago, I Called Out David Letterman. This Month, We Sat Down to Talk.
Comedy writer Nell Scovell — who quit her job on Late Night with David Letterman in 1990 after just five months because of sexism and “sexual favoritism,” and who called out Letterman in another Vanity Fair piece 10 years ago, following the revelation that he was cheating on his wife with various women who worked for him — sits down with a newly chastened Letterman, and receives a genuine apology from him.
The Often Perilous, Sometimes Lucrative, and Ever-Evolving Business of Being a YouTube Star in 2019
“Really, the digital creator class’s legitimacy is arising out of the passage of time. YouTube fame isn’t novel to Gen-Zers. It simply is.”
To Cheat and Lie in L.A.: How the College-Admissions Scandal Ensnared the Richest Families in Southern California
Presenting themselves as model, enviable parents only made their fall harder, and more enjoyable for spectators. It’s a shame they took their kids down with them.
The Beautiful Power of Ta-Nehisi Coates
Jesmyn Ward interviews “one of our most essential public intellectuals.”
“The Big Error Was That She Was Caught”: The Untold Story Behind the Mysterious Disappearance of Fan Bingbing, the World’s Biggest Movie Star
Chinese bureaucracy cracking down the Chinese multi-million dollar film industry, where salaries far outstrip the Chinese norm and tax under-reporting is the norm, and Fan Bingbing was the government’s biggest public example.
The Truth About Green Book
Peter Farrelly’s Green Book, a “true story” about an Italian-American bouncer who escorts a black pianist on a tour of the Jim Crow South in 1962, is emerging as an awards season frontrunner. But the family of the pianist, Dr. Shirley, has dismissed the film, not just for its factual inaccuracies, but for essentially revising and rewriting a black man’s identity.
