Tag: white women
Michael R. Jackson’s Subversive Vision of the American Musical
In the summer of 2020, the playwright Michael R. Jackson received an unusual message from a fan of A Strange Loop, his musical about a gay Black man’s path to creative self-awareness through the process of writing a musical about a gay Black man’s path to creative self-awareness. “Can I buy you a bulletproof vest?” the fan inquired over Instagram.
Jackson, who had just won a Pulitzer Prize for A Strange Loop and lived on a perfectly safe
Why Biden Just Can’t Shake Trump in the Polls
Like so many bands of wind and rain, hurricane-strength squalls of bad news have battered former President Donald Trump all year. Since April, he’s been indicted four times, on 91 separate felony charges, compared with zero counts for all of his White House predecessors. Trump often likes to claim that anything associated with him is the most spectacular, even when it’s not, but when it comes to accumulating criminal charges, he’s the undisputed champ of former presidents.
President Joe Biden,
The Magazine That Was a Window on America
I grew up in the 1950s, on a farm in Virginia miles away from any town or neighbors. For most of my childhood we didn’t have a television, so my three brothers and I amused ourselves fighting pretend Civil War battles in the fields and woods around our house or vying over card and board games that we spread across the living-room floor.
But for me, the best entertainment was always reading. I read for pleasure, for company, and for
The Women of Rural America Are Dying Too Young
“Boy crazy” was what people called it. “She was so boy crazy,” I would hear about my girlfriends. I never heard the reverse, that a boy was “girl crazy.” Girls having crushes, sneaking out at night to have fun: It seems innocent enough. But in my small, conservative town, a “wrong” choice at a young age could cut girls off from their future dreams, leaving them mired in despair.
Growing up in the ’90s in Clinton, Arkansas, all that
America’s Crisis of the Intellectual
In 2017, I was trying to write How to Be an Antiracist. Words came onto the page slower than ever. On some days, no words came at all. Clearly, I was in crisis.
I don’t believe in writer’s block. When words aren’t flowing onto the page, I know why: I haven’t researched enough, organized the material enough, thought enough to exhume clarity, meticulously outlined my thoughts enough. I haven’t prepared myself to write.
But no matter how much I
The ‘Mother of the Year’ Who Starved for 53 Months
Years ago, when I was in the seventh grade, an octopus sailed off the seafloor and secured herself to a rocky outcropping off the coast of California. She was nearly a mile below the surface, thousands of feet past any tendrils of sun. But in the bright beams of a submarine, the octopus’s edges glowed the reddish purple of a salted Japanese plum.
I know about the purple octopus because a remotely operated submersible watched her glide toward the cliff.
The Hidden Strain of Being an Interracial Couple on Reality TV
In the first season of Netflix’s hit reality show Love Is Blind, Lauren Speed visits the Atlanta home of her new fiancé, Cameron Hamilton. The house is airy and bright, and Lauren and Cameron, fingers laced, wander the rooms imagining the life they might have there together. But behind the scenes, that day was less dreamy than it looked.
A producer urged Lauren to peek inside Cameron’s fridge and pantry so the crew could film her commenting on what
Why Jarrett Adams Is Working to Free Terence Richardson and Ferrone Claiborne
PART I: The Writ
I
n the end, Jarrett and Joi Adams decide to confront the attorney general in person. They buy tickets to his fundraiser—they figure it’s their best chance to speak with the man. The car they’ve requested pulls up to the Airbnb they’re renting this week in August in Richmond, Virginia, and the driver sets the address on his phone for McLean, some two hours away. Jarrett and Joi settle in and talk about the case.
Jarrett
Omicron and the Return to Normalcy
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Question of the Week
The holiday break is over for most. How should America’s colleges, high schools, and elementary schools handle the winter surge of COVID-19 cases associated with the Omicron variant? What do you like most or least about how your educational institution is handling the pandemic? What local details of interest can you share about how matters are being handled near you? As ever, my email address is [email protected].
Conversations of Note
Josh Hawley’s ‘Attack on Men’
Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri surprised even some allies when he recently devoted his entire speech at a high-profile national conference of conservatives to an extended analysis of why so many men appear stuck in a cycle of “idleness and pornography and video games,” as he put it.
Hawley’s warnings against what he called liberals’ “attack on men” could open a new front in the culture wars that Republicans have used to consolidate their support among the voters most alienated