January 31, 2016
Kanye West’s New Slave Daguerreotypes
Kanye West premiered his song and video “New Slaves” by projecting it on the exterior walls of 66 buildings throughout the world. The shots in the video have only two […]
January 31, 2016
Charleston Heavy
I’ve loved Charleston for awhile now. The first time I saw the city’s name was on a baseball cap my dad brought back from Air Force Reserve training, one of […]
January 22, 2016
The War to Preserve Everything
I’m interested in all the different ways we use the word, the concept, the illusion of preservation, from food to corpses, from digital data to taxidermy, from photographs to endangered […]
January 12, 2016
No Father to His Style
On the Biz Markie’s smash hit “Just a Friend,” which I remember watching and singing along with on The Box, he sings a pleading, straining chorus over literally perfect music. […]
January 1, 2016
Gus, All Too Human
“I swear, Gus. You’d argue with a possum.” -Call Is Lonesome Dove the greatest miniseries of all time? I’ve definitely watched it more times than any other miniseries. Watching Roots […]
January 1, 2016
The Year Twenty Fixteen
When my daughter counts, she recites all the numbers in order, until she reaches “12, 13, 14, Fixteen, 17, 18, 19….” Soon enough, I’m sure she’ll separate fifteen and sixteen […]
December 30, 2015
Bullets for You
“The Cleveland police officer who shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice last month resigned from a previous small-town police job when he was deemed emotionally unstable and unfit for duty, […]
December 28, 2015
From Cop Killers to Killer Cops
The news cycle is quite strange now. One of the hottest topics—black men, and boys, many of them unarmed, shot and killed by police—is certainly old news. I have never […]
December 4, 2015
Slang Cinema: On Camp Lo and Ski Beatz
If you were a hip hop head in the late 1990s, then you probably remember the exact spot on earth you were standing when you first heard Camp Lo’s first […]
November 30, 2015
A Moveable Funeral
Sales of Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast spiked in the wake of the Paris terror attacks. The media has framed it as a book that captures the dream of Paris, […]
November 25, 2015
Poison Gas and the Origins of Data Preservation
“After reading [an] account of the astonishing possibilities of only one small branch of the 170,000 known families of insects, I began to wonder if there might not be some […]
November 16, 2015
Crash Davis, Soul Man
Bull Durham (1988) begins with grainy black and white stills of Willie Mays, Pete Rose, Babe Ruth, a ball club of women in three quarter sleeves and skirts, a woman […]