Co-Written with NBA champion Andre Iguodala, The Sixth Man spent 13 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list and made Barack Obama’s list of year end books in 2019.

“This is a very special book—a sports memoir for the ages.” -Booklist

“Compelling and important” - Shelf Awareness

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“It is a blackness of a thousand dimensions. In one scene, his character is holding forth about the cosmic nature of love. In another, he's posted up in a claw-foot tub, bathing himself in water and sunlight, wearing nothing but a bandolero hat and playing with a toy boat. In still another, he is drunk and dry-humping the air, yelling obscenities at a former lover and her new partner. His blackness is unchecked and complex, layers of angry masculinity on a bed of rose petals and women’s perfume. His blackness is a golden fitted backless bodysuit on the taut, coiled frame of a bantamweight boxer.” (more…)

“He’s flawed,” Jordan tells me of the character. “But that doesn’t give anybody a reason to take his life.” Here his voice raises a touch, and I can feel the words coming from a deeper place. “So what, he sold dope? So what, he did that? So. Fucking. What? He still had a right to get home to his daughter.” (more…)

“Time here is flat because there are no seasons, no way to remember when anything happened. You cannot say, “Oh yes, that was in the dark of winter when mother was in the hospital,” or “Right, this was in the luminous spring when we collapsed into a field of Mexican marigolds, cured ourselves of lightning strikes, and built freeways in and out of our dreams.” For all I know this Pringles thing could have happened yesterday. Maybe it was tomorrow. Actually, it might not have happened at all, now that I think about it. For a place that records so many things, it’s weird that nothing here is ever really remembered.” (more…)

In 2021 Nina Renata Aron asked me to write about Los Angeles as a companion to a short film directed by Miranda July for the now-defunct Departures travel magazine. I was given a handful of locations — Will Rogers State Beach, Los Angeles Flower Market, and Bob Baker Marionette Theatre — at which Miranda might be filming and told to go forth and multiply the words. What resulted is one of my favorite things I’ve ever written — a beautifully chaotic journey through memory in a city that frankly bleeds with the stuff. I wrote it a day after i finished the first draft of my book Another Word For Love, In the prior sixty-three hours I had written approximately 30,000 words and taken approximately one nap. Safe to say the gates were open

“In much of the fare I grew up on, that filter meant that Black characters were either throwaway figures or people who had no identity outside of poverty and struggle. Today such racist notions have become more nuanced, but they still serve as a fairly sure guide to which Black screen ventures get produced and how they are developed and marketed. The popular liberal vision of the Black experience is that it is centered on pain—the enduring of it, the overcoming of it—which translates into an endless appetite and funding stream for films and series devoted to the suffering of Black people. The result for me is that my pain and the pain of people I love is endlessly and cruelly capitalized on.“ (more…)

“For many the very word “cycling” means aggro REI dads screaming at pedestrians and clomping around the local café in cleats and wraparound sunglasses. This is a problem for a sport that is missing out on an opportunity to leverage would-be fans. The NBA rebounded in the 1990s by aligning itself with larger cultural trends like hip-​hop; while NASCAR and the NFL, with their military flyovers and salutes to the troops, have tied themselves to a brand of Americana that pulls at patriotic heartstrings, forever linking their product to the spiritual identities of millions of Americans. Cycling in this country, on the other hand, faces a crisis. There is no tradition. The portion of its identity that aspires to European status is a dead end. Stage races here do not draw a fraction of the crowd they do overseas, municipalities lack the interest and will to shut down roads for extended periods, and viewers largely don’t care to watch people riding bicycles up and down hills for days at a time. Yet many in the sport still seem to resist the pull of people like Williams who envision a uniquely American version of cycling built around street races and the personalities that represent it.” (more…)

“The Good Lord Bird” is a complicated work; it asks questions, refutes facile narratives and plays with contradictions, as much art does. But in 2020, it feels — to some perhaps more than others — that we are facing life and death, and people understandably have less tolerance for contradictions and questions. Where our families are dying, we would like answers, not questions. This is what made John Brown such a potent figure in his time, and so ripe to be resurrected in ours: There were very few questions, for him, regarding the morality of racism. He was touched, in his view divinely, by a simple and unrelenting call to address it head on, violently, without apprehension or compunction, as an immutable evil. It was not a complicated issue for him. It was either life or death, and it almost didn’t matter whose. “The crimes of this guilty land,” he is reported to have said in his final note before execution, “cannot be purged away but with blood. (more…)”

“Devastated, she was removed from the course in tears. After she apologized to the other riders, including one who was badly injured, McGowan quickly signed up for every training opportunity she could. That included sessions at the Kissena Velodrome in Queens and a road racing clinic with the Century Road Club Association in Central Park, which she learned upon arrival was actually a race. “It was like five in the morning and there was a woodpecker, just going at it,” she laughs. In that race, McGowan weirdly found herself in the lead toward the end and decided to break away. “I was like, ‘Oh, nobody else wants this?’” But the finish was farther out than she had remembered, and she was caught a few blocks from the line. Still, her efforts earned her fifth place. She knew she had done just one thing wrong, but the podium was within reach. From that moment she was hooked” read more

“Jackson drives, peppering me with questions (“Have white folks started confusing you with Brian Tyree Henry yet?”) and gleefully navigating around obstacles in our path by running two wheels up on the wet grass despite bountiful signage warning us not to do just that. Each time he does this, the cart threatens to pull a little movie-stunt two-wheel tip and throw me onto the asphalt pathway. “Engage your core,” he tells me with an 85 percent straight face. It is good advice from a seventy-year-old man from Chattanooga, Tennessee. I am vaguely scared and trying to play it cool. He is driving decisively, wholly unconcerned. At his age, the Hollywood veteran wears “wholly unconcerned” as comfortably as the faded black Adidas bucket hat he golfs in. (more…)”

“One especially devoted Warriors fan, a friend of a friend, said that watching your team win is like taking a hit of a drug: it ups your endorphins, makes you feel high, like you’ve accomplished something just by rooting for it. Losing, then, is coming down, facing the harsh reality you left behind. Eventually, everyone loses: athletes get traded, teams come apart, knees buckle, shots are missed, fans age. Early in April, I watched the Warriors play the Boston Celtics. It was the first time all season that any of us had seen the Warriors lose a game at home. People began filing out of the arena with fifteen seconds still left on the clock; it felt like the blood leaving the body of a corpse. When we are given something good, we want something great. When we are given something great, we want something impossible. Not only did we want the Warriors to surpass seventy-two wins, we wanted them never to lose again. We wanted to defy gravity, never to come down. The next day, at a practice, Steve Kerr talked about the kind of disappointment that is specific to greatness. “It’s like when Steph or Klay has an open three-pointer, and they miss at Oracle, the whole crowd groans because you can’t believe that they missed,” he said. “If we lose a game, it’s like, ‘Oh my God, they lost at home?’ ” (more…)

“At this part of our conversation, Davis dutifully unwraps the bonnet she’s wearing but not before making a handful of jokes about what it means to do this in front of a stranger. “It’s about to get serious,” she says, laughing. The character she’ll play in just a few minutes—the pugnacious and at times finespun law professor and defense attorney Annalise Keating—is infinitely put together. But Davis took the role on the condition that the character appear without a wig in some of her scenes at home. “I wanted to see a real woman on TV,” she explained during a panel discussion in the run-up to the 2015 Emmys. “I wanted to see who we are before we walk out the door in the morning and put on the mask of acceptability, ‘Please see me as pretty. Please love me.’ ” (more…)

“We were sharing food, which he had all but insisted on. I had been a tad unsure about it, not certain that it was entirely professional to be digging into a subject’s meal minutes after we met. But he seemed hampered by no such considerations. “Get in there, bro,” he said, gesturing to his plate in between discussions of whether or not people of color can be gentrifiers (his black female optician did not think so) and whether or not N.W.A. was, by any definition, “conscious rap” (an argument can be made, perhaps). I felt aware of a duality. On one hand, I was a professional reporter, trying my best to look as if I belonged where I was, doing what I was doing: sharp questions, clear thinking, research prepared. On the other hand, I was a black American man hanging out with a British-Pakistani man in a white cafe in what used to be a black neighborhood, chopping it up at a high level. On the third hand, I was a writer for a national magazine sharing a platform with an international film star while we talked about all the serpentine machinations of oppression and how they’ve woven and buried themselves in the very flesh of our lives. To dig haphazardly into his plate of quinoa or not?” (more...)

I ask if his sudden and breathless celebration by white people ever makes him feel like a... I’m searching for the words. “A way to relieve pressure for people?” he asks me, stirring his tea. “Like a kind of peace offering? I accept it as a possibility. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that’s what it is.… As long as what you’re doing as an artist is resonating with people, I’m not as concerned about if that’s convoluted or not by their own prejudices, because at the end of the day you gotta accept people on their terms.” (more…)

“This is what makes Khan a different kind of activist. They are here to change policies, for sure, but the sermons and talks and writing go far beyond the basic arguments for why there shouldn’t be racism or transphobia, the crisp infographics on how to be an ally. What they are advocating for is a greater sense of wholeness for all people. In Khan’s view this means being prepared to challenge everything we’ve been told. “To assimilate into a system that we didn’t design...is to forfeit a part of yourself,” they tell me as the day stretches into early afternoon. “And I don’t think that people really understand that that’s the trade-off. You can’t fully know who you are if you assimilate and disappear yourself into a set of conditions that you didn’t design.” (more…)

“This is the world I let be created. Under my watch. They know this. They blame me for it. They are right. It hurts my heart. Also, would you like dinner? What movie should we watch? Tell me about your day. Parenting, like life, is heartbreak followed by reality, followed by love, followed by loneliness, followed by despair, followed by jokes, followed by exhaustion. If this is what you are experiencing, you are doing it right. If you are returning over and over again to watch the simple miracle of growth, you are doing it right.” (more…)

“Who is this person? If he is a predator, then there is no way that anything else he did, no matter how moving, can be honored. But what if he is simply a person who believes completely and desperately that genuine and honest love is the only important thing there is? This is what makes us obsess over the horror of Michael Jackson. We must know whether he is an angel or beast. The concerts in front of millions, the humans reduced to tears at the mere sight of his hand, the way his voice can soften the hardest and most frightened parts of us—these things convince us that he is the former. But maybe that version of him is simply too fanciful, too naïve for us, mired as we are in the muck of our human struggle. Maybe we cannot or will not accept the existence of the kind of unblemished love he claimed to represent.” (more…)

My first ever published work, and anthology with MindSumo. The thirty-eight stories in Freshman Year of Life tell the truth about life beyond college graduation from the voices of people a few years out. Some of their experiences are funny, some heartwarming; some are about their successes, and others reflect their failures. There are stories about going from a committed college relationship to casual dating in an unfamiliar city, navigating a toxic work environment, learning how to stay patient in a part of your life that isn’t defined by semesters and finals, and tackling the task of making new friends, something you may not have had to do since college orientation. (buy here…)

“The truth is that we don’t know the answers to these questions, and we simply won’t until we do. One parenting concept says that we impose our will on our children, raise them up to be as we want them to be. But what if you simply lack the will, the force, to make your child do what you want? What if your child is not a robot that you can program but a sentient, headstrong being who will ultimately do what he feels like doing? It occurs to me that when you make all your plans about what kind of parent you’re going to be, the one thing you forget to take into account is the actual child. How do you lead your child to freedom when your child doesn’t want to follow?” (read more…)

“…even though we are not yet together, Moses Sumney is with me, booming through the system of my rental at this very moment. The plucking bassline of “Cut Me,” the latest single from his newest album, græ: Part 1, is gently vibrating the car and everything in it as if trying to wake us all from a pleasant slumber. The song is full but spacious, stacked in sonic tiers that overlay one another without overlapping. Brass lines are restrained and muted—more trombone and French horn than trumpet and saxophone—and where other funk horns sting, these do something closer to making a clean incision in the softest part of your flesh. The heat and the concrete and the vast deserted sea of Los Angeles can make you feel crazy. But other times the sun is so imminently hopeful as to make even the act of suffering feel beautiful. That is how this city takes up residence in you. And Moses Sumney is perfect for this vibe.” ( more…)

“But when McCraney talked, he didn’t talk about the play or the dialogue. Instead, he talked about grief. Casually, as though it were something that just came to his mind. He explained what it felt like to lose his mother at 22. He did not talk about how she died, and he hinted only a little at the complexity of their relationship; this address was not autobiographical. It was to do with emotions. McCraney described how grief lives in a person’s body, how it settles there. He explained its half-life, the unreliable nature of its decay. He talked about the phenomenon, when grieving a loved one, in which you begin to have memories of times after their death that you think they must have been present for. Remember when I won an Academy Award for my movie, and you were so proud? And then he talked about how things like that make you grieve their absence all over again, and how that grief catches you unawares, taking over your body when you least expect it.” (more…)

“Lately I have come to the conclusion, and you may disagree, that pretty much every experience we have moves us either toward life or away from it. There are some things that suck the life out of you, that make you feel smaller and less human, that alienate you from yourself; they calcify your fear and carve a monument out of your emptiness. Then there are those that bring you closer to life, that grow in you the desire to create, to nurture, to see beautiful things and become them. This is the love that increases your attachment to people and animals, makes you smile at children or go outside to see the moon. Every experience is either life-affirming or life-denying.

There is just one trick. It sometimes happens that to move toward love — true, active, life-affirming love — means to move toward death.” (more…)

“This is the apogee of Monk’s vision. Music that’s insane and gorgeous, droll and dire, ardently crafted to be so perfectly wrong that it robs you of your predictions and replaces them with ever unfolding alms of unexpected rapture. The harder you fight it, the more frustrating it is. Maybe the life work of Thelonious Monk was to crack apart and invert the rusted shell of the piano and open a portal into the bedraggled contradictions and breathless off-tempo grind of being black in America. This was his power over you and over the world. He reveled in confusing the outsider. And when that outsider has enslaved, beat, hung, dragged, murdered, raped, starved, and excluded your people for centuries, then it’s more than a game of intellectual keep-away. It’s an effort for spiritual freedom. But, of course, it’s a short one. Because everything you make will eventually belong to someone else. This is the American Way.” (more…)

The other end of her skill set was her unmatched ability to make listeners feel every bit of what she was feeling. Think of the vast and prickly joy of a track like “Feeling Good,” how it conveys a manic freedom, a heart-bursting love that shoots from the chest in nerve-sized lightening bolts, tingling like chandeliers shattering throughout your limbs. Or the meandering mourning of “Plain Gold Ring,” that unfolds itself slowly over the dark, creeping motive that comprises the song’s melodic underpinning. She delivers, “In my heart it will never be spring” in a way that darkens the skies of your own heart, stripping the foliage, laying bare the branches of your skeleton. At their peak, Simone’s powers bordered on emotional clairvoyance.

Predictably it was when she turned the full power of these weapons to the cause of affirming the rights and humanity of black people that her career began to falter in ways from which she could never fully recover. (more…)

“Against these, her vocal delivery is plaintive. The production does not struggle to make her sound big, like someone onstage, bathing in high-powered lights and a sea of fog. Rather the closeness and minimal vocal effects bring us to her in a small, candlelit room. Her flow is deceptively natural, with her background in poetry giving her the ability to confidently explore all of the minute gradations between speaking and rapping. Sometimes she tumbles words out haphazardly, and other times she rides the beat hard, almost driving it. She is in possession of a broad array of rhythmic variations that she stealthily deploys and switches up throughout the album. Some of this is on display in “Lost,” from Chance's 2013 mixtape Acid Rap, where her stellar guest verse catapulted her into the national conversation. But there she stayed fairly on beat, like a guest respectfully observing house rules. Telefone, by contrast, finds her at her own home late into the night, beginning to let everything loose. Telefone shows her rhyming on her own terms.” (more…)

“If America, a land that holds our souls captive in her very DNA, is not our nation, then what on earth is?” (more…)

“From this regal lineage, Miseducation strikes out with the lionhearted courage of a crusader. But it can’t stay there. Metaphors of God soldiers and Lions of Judah are good as far as they go, but they don’t go far enough. The problem is that such a worldview is fundamentally male, which is to say more ubiquitous than correct. Lauryn Hill was tasked with something more difficult than that: to walk a series of intertwined tightropes specific to young black women. To be vulnerable, but fearless. To tell the truth, but look beautiful in doing so. To be driven by love, but ready to fight. To be soft enough to mother a newborn, but hard enough to protect her family. At 23 and pregnant, she was too young to be responsible for this much. It’s just that most people didn’t notice it, because on The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, she handled these competing drives so beautifully.” (more…)

“But like a lot of rap and R&B artists who appeal primarily to women, from Drake to Justin Bieber, G-Eazy rides the line between playing the bad boy and the sensitive alternative. He’s the one your mother warned you to stay away from, because he’ll only break your heart. But then he’s one of the only significant rappers to shout out this January’s Women’s March on Washington. This kind of hurts-so-good dichotomy is the stuff male sex symbols have historically been made of, but the relatively wide spectrum of G-Eazy’s approach to women made me reflect on his parentage. He was raised in liberal Berkeley by a single mom, an artist and teacher, whose long-term partner was a woman. In a story that has become public property since he rapped about it on “Everything Will Be OK,” his mother’s partner suffered from severe depression. It was Gerald, at 15 years old, who discovered her almost lifeless body just moments before a suicidal overdose claimed her. (more…)

He was a force, eating cockroaches in music videos, fantasizing about murder and suicide, delighting in hiding behind a veneer of edgelord homophobic, misogynist lyrics. His was a youthful, playful, nearly theoretical form of destruction. He reveled in blurring the line between character and artist and troll, between ego and id. Yet he was so sure-handed in his artistry, so unfettered, that he was precisely what I, and probably you, could have used as a kid: someone who does not care about anyone’s rules but seems such a genius that no one opposing him could ever be taken seriously. Your parents can ground you; they can’t do a thing to Tyler. Thus: He represented freedom. A grisly and dark one, for sure, but a freedom nonetheless. (more…)

“As legitimate children of the ’60s, they de-tuned and distorted the aggressive toms and snaky guitars of surf and garage rock, peeling back their layers to expose something rusted and collapsing or bloody and beating underneath, depending on the song. Even the name Sonic Youth evokes the kind of lurking emotional terrorism with which the young threaten the old. Oh shit, the kids have guitars and they’ve seen through everything. Run. The rebel nature of Evol linked it more closely to hip-hop than to much of the rock of the time, which in its mainstream form consisted mostly of dudes with feathered hair whose lone skill was creating corny entendres about women’s bodies. Evol, by contrast, abutted and even paralleled the brewing aesthetic of New York hip-hop: urban, layered, complex, real, and lyrical.” (more…)

“Never mind that most of us had never been to Africa. The point was not verisimilitude or a precise accounting of Africa’s reality. It was the envisioning of a free self. Nina Simone once described freedom as the absence of fear, and as with all humans, the attempt of black Americans to picture a homeland, whether real or mythical, was an attempt to picture a place where there was no fear. This is why it doesn’t matter that Wakanda was an idea from a comic book, created by two Jewish artists. No one knows colonization better than the colonized, and black folks wasted no time in recolonizing Wakanda. No genocide or takeover of land was required. Wakanda is ours now. We do with it as we please.” (more...)

“We are ready to recognize the humanity of those who were victims of an unequal system; the film’s poise forces us to recognize, as well, the humanity of those who served as executioners. “Let It Fall” maintains a remarkable balance, laying bare how deeply the system was designed to oppress some and privilege others, and still portraying all the players in that system simply as flawed human beings. Ridley tells a story in which there are no winners, just losers of varying degrees, mostly determined by race and class.” (more…)

“The photo on her next studio album, 1996's One in a Million, saw her defiantly staring down the camera, dressed in a power jacket and silver-rimmed glasses that once again hid her eyes from ours. The look is pissed-off and unbreakable, not unlike the aggrieved spouse of a politician caught in a sex scandal. She was 17. Aaliyah always had the gift of presenting as a woman even when she was a teenager. The curse was that she did so in a world that doesn’t know how to separate womanhood from sexuality.” (more…)

“This is the setup. But the telling is unhurried and in many cases unfinished. We are simply here among these people as they face life and what we mostly see are tableaux, verdant photographs of African beauty so profound and deeply rooted as to be nearly cosmic. The intermittent return to family portraits offers one framing device, but another is the voice of the as-of-yet unborn child offering observations from both the past and the future. In this film womb and ancestor are one, and as Eli wrestles with the fear that Eula’s child may not be his, and the subsequent inability to distinguish a symbol of love from a symbol of hate, family matriarch Nana reminds him that the question is not his to answer. The child has a voice of her own.” (more…)

“When Hosseini opens the door, I barely get out a formal greeting before he interrupts. “Have you seen it?” he asks. He is tall and dashing, and carries himself with a Clooney-esque, grizzled charm.

“C’mon,” he says, handing me a pair of specially made sunglasses and darting off towards the back of the building. He points to a spot in the rear courtyard. “Right there,” he says. “That’s the best spot.”

I put on the sunglasses and look up at the sky. The sun is a perfect circle, cut neatly into a crescent by the dark round shadow of the moon. It is like nothing I have ever seen. I had tried and failed to watch the eclipse from my car as I drove to the meeting, but what Hosseini shows me is many orders of magnitude more breathtaking. After a moment I take off the glasses and look in his direction. He is beaming proudly, as though seeing the sun through my eyes.” (more…)

“Imagine you are 19 years old. You grow up feeling like an outsider, only to discover you have size and power that sets you apart and makes people sniff around your family and call your house.

Imagine that you come to a school to play ball and you find three people who love and embrace you as you discover your deepest and truest meaning. People who share with you everything from the glories of God to the glories of running it back infinitely while trash-talking until you have nothing left, until you have burned through your second, third and even final winds and your body ceases to be a body, becoming instead a vessel, a spirit.

How much money would it take for you to give that up and join the world of adults?” (more…)

“I beg of you to care about this. But I’m not sure that you do. I beg of myself to care about this, but I’m not sure that I do. Sometimes I cannot. Sometimes it is easier to watch Netflix and eat potato chips until I fall asleep. The problem with that kind of sleep is that I never want to get up from it. But I wake up the next day and force myself into life. I text friends, I go to work, I take care of my children, I tell people I love them. I know now, at 44, that not caring is how I play and replay my trauma on myself, and how I play and replay it upon you. I know that trauma is toxic and contagious. I know that it sometimes makes people reject me, it sometimes makes me find people who will reject me, and it sometimes makes me reject myself.” (more…)

“Most people who work for the City of Oakland know the town as it exists in space. It’s about 56 square miles stretching from Alcatraz Avenue in the north to Durant and San Leandro Creek in the south, from Skyline Boulevard in the east to the Alameda Channel in the west. But Betty Marvin knows the city as it exists on a map of time. From its founding in the 1850s to its industrial growth in the first half of the twentieth century, through the radical explosions and riots of the 1960s to the crime waves of the 1980s and the tech influx and gentrification in the 2000s. More than anyone in the city, Ms. Marvin is aware of the passage of time, how everything is forgotten and only sometimes remembered again. She sees documents and draft cards and unravels the mysteries of the dead. She plumbs the depths of our paper trails, canonical, and dry and often the only thing left behind after the full, whole and messy life is gone. She sees how random it is; what dies, and what is chosen to live on. So maybe to her it makes perfect sense that a writer would come in trying to tell the story of an address the very day after she happened upon it. It was Homer Williams’ time to become one of the remembered ones.” (more…)

“He looks less like a professional basketball player and more like that short, loud guy at the YMCA gym who unleashes a cascade of funny one-liners, entertaining the whole room, while crossing you up and draining 3s in your face. A guy like that usually has to make up for his lack of height with an abundance of some other quality. Speed. Kindness. Money. Or in the case of this one, intensity. I wouldn't say you could see it. Rather, it's that you can feel it. A Very Big Something going on just behind the eyes, in his wry half-smile, in the way he seems to be genuinely noticing you without actually looking at you.

Should you step on the floor to oppose him, you are agreeing to receive this intensity in profligate doses. You might as well sign a waiver.” (more…)

“For the first year or so, you keep the relationship going. Not willing to admit it’s truly over, the both of you keep playing the game. You push her buttons, she pushes yours. Your intimate knowledge of one another, the secrets you once whispered in close moments, are now weaponized. You remember years ago, when the two of you were barely in your twenties, you saw a couple fighting on the street. You said: “Why is it so hard for people to let go?” And she said: “Because you can never let someone walk away with all your secrets.” Hearing her say that, you fell in love all over again; her intelligence, her emotional courage, her understanding of what makes our hearts work. Over a decade later, you hate her for those things and how she uses them against you. You hate yourself for how you use them against her.” (more…)

“There was something about the room itself, appointed as a sacred space, the album cover propped on an altar and surrounded by candles, the Byzantine paintings of Coltrane as a saint with his horn in one hand and the Scriptures in the other, the light of God rising from behind his head. There was something about the melancholy gaze of his face, the hollow and determined resignation of his eyes. A saint is someone who didn’t mean to be a saint but had no other choice. A saint was a kid. A saint was an addict. A saint was in the Navy. A saint detoxed in a pool of sweat and tears and God came to him. A saint dies at 40. A saint makes music that makes teenagers he will never meet cry on buses in the San Fernando Valley. There was something about all of this that made it safe for me to become lost in the swell of this music. There is something about a saint that makes it safe for all of us to get lost in the swell of being human.” (more…)

“Sometimes you and I talked on the phone, and I was always doing fine. You were always doing fine. It was always great to hear from one another. It was always time to go.” (more…)

“It’s hard to continue. I wish it was my kids bedtime. I wish the dishes were done. I wish the house was clean. I wish America wasn’t racist. I wish Mike Brown was in police custody. I wish Darren Wilson admitted guilt. I wish America admitted guilt.” (more…)

“Maybe the best single quote on the Black Experience in America is in Ralph Ellison's 1952 masterwork, Invisible Man. The titular character makes the dizzying observation that "black is and black ain't," a contradiction central to the madness of race in America. It's real. But it's bullshit. People only see black when you want to be human, but as soon as you're being beat, shot, and shit on for your blackness, suddenly it's all "race doesn't matter," and "we're all one." We've taken a biological lie and forced it into a centuries-deep social truth. The mere effort of both maintaining and denying this charade has made America maniacal and Blackness insane.

This contradiction drives Famuyiwa, like many black storytellers, to undertake a number of strategies that shouldn't be revolutionary, but are. He uses the cinematic language of 90s indie teen comedies like Rushmore and Go! to tell a story in a setting where moviegoers more likely expect to see Boyz n the Hood. Here he captures the "black ain't" side of the Ellison quote. If Max Fischer can be charming, resourceful, and arrogant, so can Malcolm. If Ronna and Claire can have a slick, madcap adolescent drug caper, so can Jib and Diggy. Race and class do not trump the universally understood panicked weightlessness of a fading American adolescence.” (more…)

Kamaiyah’s fantasies are more humble and idiosyncratic: a dining room table, a staircase, a bottle of champagne, a Nintendo 64. She desires the richness of having a roof over one’s head and a carpet to sit on. It is the inverse of typical critiques of hip-hop materialism. Rather than asking from the top—why do we have to be rich?—Kamaiyah’s ask is from the bottom: What is it like to not to be broke? (more…)

“King knew that if he failed to execute the next fifteen to twenty seconds of his life with absolute perfection, this could be his last chance to play professional football. As he had done countless times before, he lined up at his spot and prepared to yell out the snap count. But before he could open his mouth, a player on the opposing team, the Dallas Cowboys, took one look at him and shouted.

“A black punter?! It’s a fake! It’s a fake!” (more…)

“We felt hope that day. But that hope was the flip side of the terror, anguish, and frustration we had felt every single day before, living in a country that, for centuries, systematically abused many of its people, and then punished those people for trying to regain their humanity. To be black in America is a wild and endless assault on the senses. You can spend every day fighting off your spiritual and intellectual extinction. (more…)”

“We draw blood like we’re performing an initiation rite, and then marvel quietly at our own wounds and the wounds of others. I once played street football with a kid who broke his collarbone but finished the game. He didn’t even cry. We talked about him with reverence for years afterward, the story of that day told and re-told with ever-expanding details of his feats of stoicism and strength. We were about ten years old. I haven’t seen or heard from him in decades, but I still think of him as possessing some kind of superpower, a small but beautiful mettle that elevated him above the rest of us. After fights, bruises, falls, skinned knees, the appropriate thing to do was to say little, and to keep company with others who said little about their own pain. This was how you gained fellowship. Where I grew up, admission into manhood was not earned by violence but, rather, through a learned immunity to it.” (more…)