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The NFL Is Just Not That Into Colin Kaepernick, and This Sham 'Workout' Proves It
While thinking about the nebulous “workout” the NFL recently offered to Colin Kaepernick, I’m reminded of…He’s Just Not That Into You. Which, well, let me explain: Like most other zeitgeist-driving cultural entities of the early aughts, the general premise of the book and subsequent film He’s Just Not That Into You hasn’t aged well. Back…
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40 Questions for the People Who Stand as Soon as the Plane Lands
(Disclaimer: If you’re physically impaired in some capacity and need to stand as soon as the plane lands, please ignore this and keep standing! If not, well, answer me!) 1. Where are you going? 2. Do you not yet realize that we are going to the same place? 3. And that the door is shut?…
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10 Worthwhile Hobbies For These Bored Billionaires Who So Obviously Need Them
1. Cross-country road trips, where they drive to different states just to hunt and eat other rich people. 2. Provide funding for a commercial airline where the people who stand when the plane first lands are immediately ejected from it, shot into the atmosphere, and melted by the sun. 3. Go to the moon, and…
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10 Thoughts on What the Popeye’s Chicken Sandwich Craze Says About Black People and Our Misplaced Priorities
1. Zip 2. Zilch 3. Zippo 4. Zero 5. Nada 6. Nathan 7. Nothing 8. Naw 9. Naught 10. Nigga?
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I Will Never Forgive America for Trying to Convince Me That Richard Spencer Is ‘Dapper’
The pathologically un-rewatchable Joker has become the highest-grossing R-rated movie in history, surpassing Deadpool 2. I am not surprised by this, as the audience for depictions of maladjusted and sexually frustrated white men finding catharsis in violence is, well, bottomless. Add a mundane mythos, a late-’70s/early-’80s NYC aesthetic, a refried casserole of important seeming themes…
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If Everything Is a Lynching, Nothing Is a Lynching
I’m reminded, today, a day after Donald Trump called his impeachment inquiry a lynching—and an hour after reading that good ole’ Uncle Joe Biden once made the same analogy about Bill Clinton’s impeachment—of last week’s round of “So, Who Doesn’t Want to Be a Nigger But Wants to Say Nigga?” Specifically, my thoughts are centered…
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The Emperor Has No Jokes: How Come None of Y'all Told Me That Joker Was So Damn Boring?
Mostly, Joker was what I expected it to be. I’d read and heard enough about it in the past several weeks that I knew what to anticipate. I knew it’d be a goulash of loud and important-sounding themes— “mental health!” “economic anxiety!” “capitalism!”—without actually saying much about any of them. Ellipses on a neon billboard.…
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There Are No Good Apples
It was somewhat disconcerting for my cousin, a cop in Washington, D.C., to attend my book event at Politics and Prose in March. Not really for me, since I knew he was coming. But when he walked in towards the end of my talk—in full vested, booted and armed cop gear—the atmosphere shifted, and I…
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Black Man With (Possible? Probable?) Hair Plugs Complains That Black People Care Too Much About Our Hair
Perhaps the most telling aspect of thrift shop fedora repurposed as a strip club daytime shift buffet tray with sentience Jason Whitlock’s continued descent into Take Perdition is that there’s no variance with him. For someone who frequently decries SJW groupthink, he’s as predictable as a burp after a sip of soda. If a black…
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18-Year-Old Brandt Jean’s Hug of Amber Guyger Made Me Sick. But It Ain’t About Me, Though
The conversation about Brandt Jean’s hug of convicted murderer Amber Guyger has mostly cannibalized both the news of the (still surprising) conviction and the (not surprising at all) sentence. The image of the act is both explosive and saccharine; a molotov cocktail dipped in high fructose corn syrup. It’s impossible to see that and not…
