Jon Stewart Is Back to Weigh In
“I don’t think [the news media] has ever had a good handle on a political moment. It’s not designed for that. It’s designed for engagement.”
Punishment by Pandemic
In an Arkansas jail with one of the America’s largest coronavirus outbreaks, prison terms become death sentences.
The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration
“Peril is generational for black people in America—and incarceration is our current mechanism for ensuring that the peril continues.”
Walking Is Making a Major Comeback
On a newfound appreciation for the stroll.
Beneath the Black Rocks
My mother’s eyes traced what was happening with happiness of a child. When she asked my father how it was possible, he thought she was asking about the flowers, but she wasn’t. She was asking how it was possible to see this much beauty at once.
A Deadly Mosquito-Borne Illness Is Brewing in the Northeast
EEE kills almost half of its victims, and cases are on the rise.
Black Wall Street: The African American Haven That Burned and Then Rose From the Ashes
On the racially motivated destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood district.
From Soldier to Worker
Police unions were born of resistance to discipline for brutality. Do they belong in the labor movement?
Pandemic Time: A Distributed Doomsday Clock
Even within a single apartment building, neighbors experience different temporalities. In one unit, we have a single extrovert experiencing the acute trauma of being forced to work alone from home. Next door, we have parents suddenly juggling childcare and work. At the end of the hall is an immigrant using WhatsApp to track the fate of family members on the other side of the globe who are suddenly physically unreachable due to travel bans. Even members of a single household experience pandemic time differently.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "The Vanishing Half [Excerpt]"
In the 1960s, a white subdivision prepares for the arrival of a black family.
The First Year Out
Makeda Davis emerged from more than seven years in prison to a life that is complicated, unfamiliar, and, sometimes, soul crushing.
Kierna Mayo is the showrunner and head writer for the Lena Horne Prize for Artists Creating Social Impact. She is the former editor-in-chief of EBONY and Honey Magazine, which she co-founded at age 27.
Guest host Patrice Peck is a freelance journalist and writes the Coronavirus News for Black Folks newsletter. Her most recent article is "Black Journalists Are Exhausted," an op-ed published in The New York Times.
“Advocacy is not a bad word. Telling the truth about a particular slice of life is what my career has been. That slice of life started about young people who were partaking in hip hop culture. Most of them were of color, most of them were poor. So that was a perspective. If you begin to tell the stories of those people at that time, that begins to have an advocacy feel and taste and touch. Not even with a consciousness to it. Because this is a lost voice. This is a lost point of view. It is not in the mainstream. It is not being centered. No one is telling it. So the mere act of shedding light journalistically in places where there has been no light before is advocacy. Sorry, journalists. Sorry, all you impartial, fair-and-balanced folks.”
Thanks to Mailchimp for sponsoring this week's episode.
The Breaking Point
Black men and women are still dying across the country. The power that is American policing has conceded nothing.
Noah ’40’ Shebib Is Racing to Fix the Damage
The producer behind nearly everything Drake does and the multiple sclerosis that has claimed significant portions of his brain.
Jailed Ferguson Protester Joshua Williams Wants to Be Out There With Everyone
Joshua Williams was 18 when he was arrested in 2014 for stealing a bag of chips and lighting a QuikTrip trash can on fire in the aftermath of a protest sparked by the death of Antonio Martin near Ferguson, MO. He is still in prison.
How Do We Change America?
The quest to transform this country cannot be limited to challenging its brutal police.
A Letter to a Younger Me
I remember when you were a little girl, you used to call yourself “peach-brown”. Peach represented your mother, brown represented your father, and together they made peach-brown, a perfect articulation at the time for what you were. The colors came from the crayons you matched to the skin of your parents, and although they were separate and didn’t mix together very well on paper, they were the best you had at the time. This silly little phrase represented what would become a lifelong struggle of coming into your own identity.
Tatiana’s Luck
Tatiana Angulo came to the U.S. legally and was trying to do everything right. Then came the coronavirus.
Maxine Hong Kingston’s Genre-Defying Life and Work
The Asian-American literary pioneer, whose writing has paved the way for many immigrants’ stories, has one last big idea.
The Most Hated Man at the Naval Academy
Bruce Fleming is known for being a chauvinistic, egoistic loudmouth–but firing him has been a lot harder than the Pentagon thought.
About Face
A non-fiction comic on the evolution of military and civilian style amid the ‘forever war.’
Black Protester, White Protester
On the divisive narrative of “outside agitators” and how labor history can help guide the protest movement.
The Story Has Gotten Away from Us
Six months of life and death in America.
Our Brother Kaizen
George Floyd’s murder is a brutal reminder that the entire legal edifice—from slavery to mass incarceration—was designed to break down black people meticulously. This isn’t accidental.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Say, She Toy"
CW: racist language
A black android faces grave human racism.
