Politics & Current Events

The Photograph That Changes the Way You See Him There is an image of Earl Campbell later in life that is difficult to reconcile with the football player people remember. The man who once ran through NFL defenders needed a walker and sometimes a wheelchair just to move around. His hands had become so arthritic

Before Michael Jackson Called, Teddy Riley Had Already Changed the Radio By the time Michael Jackson reached out to Teddy Riley, Riley was already a major force in R&B. In the late 1980s, he helped create New Jack Swing, a sound that blended hip-hop beats with R&B vocals, melodies, and harmonies. He had already helped

Sleeping in Front of the Life He Wanted Back around 2011, Mario Kelly’s life had fallen apart. He was unemployed, divorced, and living out of his van in Detroit. That alone would have been enough to make a lot of people feel defeated. But Mario did something unusual. Instead of parking randomly every night, he

I Miss the Old Internet I miss when the internet did not seem determined to sell me something every five seconds. If you were online in the mid-1990s or early 2000s, you probably remember what I mean. The internet felt rougher, slower, stranger, and somehow more personal. People built little websites that looked terrible by

The Sunday Night the Gold Window Closed On Sunday evening, August 15, 1971, President Richard Nixon went on national television and announced a change that would help transform the world’s monetary system. He ordered the Treasury to suspend the convertibility of dollars into gold for foreign governments and central banks. Under the Bretton Woods system,

When the Most Profitable Picture Is the Worst One I want you to sit with this question for a minute because I think it takes the conversation about internalized racism somewhere deeper. What happens when the most profitable version of Black visibility is the version that makes Black people easier to blame? We usually talk

The Thought That Disturbed Me I caught myself thinking something today that disturbed me, and I had to sit with it for a minute. My brother called me from a diner and described two Black people nearby: a woman talking loudly on the phone about her child’s father being on probation and a young man

The Story Many of Us Have Heard I have something I want to straighten out because I have heard this story repeated for years. Somebody will say that white people are called Caucasian because white Europeans originally came from the Caucasus Mountains. At first, that explanation sounds perfectly logical. Caucasian sounds like Caucasus, so case

The Groove That Refused to Die I love stories like this because sometimes music takes a life of its own and travels farther than the person who created it ever imagined. In 1981, Rick James released “Super Freak,” a song with a bass line that is almost instantly recognizable. It was funky, playful, unusual, and

A Book Sitting Under Glass There is a book sitting at Yale University that has been frustrating some very smart people for more than a century. It is called the Voynich Manuscript, and it contains roughly 240 pages filled with strange writing and even stranger illustrations. Some pages show plants that are difficult to identify.