I’ve enjoyed stand-up comedy since well before I was old enough to be listening to anyone who wasn’t Sinbad. But only recently did a routine actually give me goose bumps for the first time. It was from the coda of Anthony Jeselnik’s Thoughts and Prayers, currently on Netflix: This is who I make fun of…

It’s tough being a hip-hop fan in your mid-30s. Your formative years took place entirely during the genre’s “renaissance”–roughly 1992 to 2000—when classics dropped weekly and before ringtone rap, singles-driven albums and J-Kwon came in and stunk up the whole joint. You know what quality and effort sound like. Some hip-hop heads—the portly dudes rocking…

Don’t let my Neon Carrot-crayon complexion fool you. Both of my parents are Negroes. Mind you, they’re also Neon Carrot Negroes: Pops is Louisiana Creole—a (literal) cotton-picking product of the rural Jim Crow South. Mama was raised around the housing project culture of Detroit in the 1950s and ’60s. I was born in Detroit near…

Not long ago, my dudes and I were musing over the marital status of certain women with whom we attended college—specifically, those with successful careers who are also fine as hell. We wondered why, as far as we knew, they’d never been married or in a significant long-term relationship. Not that they should or need…