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Do You Know What 'Brolic' Means? (And If Not, Where Are You From?)
While walking through some mud at Moraine State Park last weekend, I thought about how “mud” is one of those perfect words that fits exactly what it is. Mud looks and acts and feels and smells exactly like something we should call “mud.” It would make no sense if the word for mud was something…
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I Just Want to Be 'Normal,' and I Need a Therapist to Convince Me It Doesn't Exist
“It is weird?” I asked, in a message I copied and pasted to several people through text, on Gchat, and in Facebook Messenger, six weeks ago. The question was a followup to a revelation I also shared with the same people: I’d recently discovered, while finally seriously researching potential therapists—after telling myself for years that…
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I Hope My Ancestors Were Goat Herders, Not Kings and Queens
Did Wakanda have housing projects? Payday lenders? A Wakandan Dollar General? These are questions I have whenever I watch Black Panther, and I’m sure there are comic book people who can provide answers. They are also dumb questions because Wakanda doesn’t exist, and whoever invented that nation could also invent a world where royalty can…
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I Just Want to Hit the Brunch LeBron James Apparently Went to Last Night
So the NBA bubble thing is weird. And the social justice messaging on the jerseys is dumb. So dumb. SO DUMB. But I am also weird and dumb, and I am fascinated by the uncanny valley of the NBA’s reboot. The crowds are computer-generated avatars! Some people in the gyms are wearing masks and some…
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White People Won't Save You
There are tens of thousands of Americans—nurses and uncles; bus drivers and doctors; aunties and baristas; grad students and my friend—who were killed by COVID-19 because they just weren’t able to escape it. Perhaps their occupation was high-risk. Perhaps they were unable to effectively social distance. Perhaps they had underlying—and white supremacy-induced—medical conditions that made…
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How To Prepare Steak Exactly How I Like It, Since I Don't Give a Shit If You Like It, Too
There are places on TV, in magazines, and on the internet where you can find peer-and-eater-reviewed methods for preparing, cooking, and staging great steaks. Where the people who make the steaks promise that, if you follow their directions, step-by-step, you will have a delicious steak too. I am not one of those people. This is…
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Thanks to Terry Crews, I Can Finally Put 'Coon' in a Headline Here!
Although we’re pretty much free to use whichever language we wish within the body of a piece here, headlines are different. Most profanity is fine, in the proper context. But proper context or not, the granddaddy (“fuck”) needs approval from our editor-in-chief. Sexually explicit terms are a no-go, and slurs are, too. Well, mostly. The…
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Why I'm Not Going to Give My Kids 'The Talk'
“So,” the moderator asked, during a public (and socially distant) book talk last week—my first time being indoors anywhere other than my house or a grocery store since early March—“what would you change if you wrote that chapter to your daughter today?” I’ve been asked a variant of that question dozens of times in the…
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I've Eaten 170,000 Honey Roasted Peanuts Since March
So this morning after eating the 170,000th honey roasted peanut I’ve eaten since March OH IT WAS SO DELICIOUS THE WAY THE HONEY AND THE ROASTED PEANUT CONVERGED IN MY MOUTH CRUNCHY SWEET TANGY SEXY YES SEXY A HONEY ROASTED PEANUT IS THE SEXIEST NUT WAY SEXIER THAN CASHEWS WHICH HAVE NUT SCOLIOSIS AND ALMONDS…
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Why Are the Men in Talib Kweli's Life Enabling Him to Harass Black Women?
There’s been a bit of a debate within The Root on how to cover Talib Kweli’s inexhaustible obsession with Maya Moody. For context, the 44-year-old rapper, who has over one million Twitter followers, grew upset when Moody tweeted the mildest of observations about the sort of women rappers tend to marry, and has tweeted at…
