“America Does Not Deserve Me.” Why Black People Are Leaving the United States

The pandemic prompted a lot of people to move to a lot of different places. But as Kate Linthicum reports for LAT, the scale of “Blaxit”—Black Americans’ emigration around the world—could make it one of the largest such patterns since the 1920s. But while Europe has long been a home for Black American artists, the current moment stretches from Mexico to Ghana, and encompasses all walks of life. This is what following one’s bliss looks like.

[Nuriddin] acknowledges that she is lucky to have a job that allows her to work remotely, and that a lot of people, including many of those from her parents’ generation, don’t. She’s trying to convince her cousins to find work that will allow them to live outside of the country.

Like many Black expats here, she’s still learning Spanish. She communicates easily with the English-speaking descendants of Jamaicans, but talking to other Costa Ricans is hard. Still, she says she feels a mutual recognition when she locks eyes with Black locals. “There’s almost a little glimmer in the eye when you look at each other,” she said. “There’s like a little nod.”

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Shams Charania’s Scoop Dreams

Ask any basketball fan where the best trade news comes from, and you’ll hear one name: Shams. For Intelligencer, Reeves Wiedeman profiles the journalist who turned the industry on its head with little more than the power of a tweet. (He also delivers one hell of a business story.)

Wojnarowski and Charania have become so dominant in the race for scoops that most other reporters who cover the league told me they have stopped trying. “I talk to the same agents, the same GMs, but I never even try to break news,” another ESPN reporter told me. “I know it’s already promised to one of them — like they’re a wire service.” In an attempt to keep up, Ken Berger, who was a national NBA reporter at CBS Sports, started using Google Voice to send texts because it allowed him to send separate identical messages to five people at once. “I could text three agents and two front-office people in five seconds, and I’m still getting beat,” Berger said. He eventually left NBA media for good to run a fitness studio in Queens. To help his old colleagues, he started a personal-training program tailored to helping NBA journalists survive the unhealthy lifestyle the job entailed.

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Who’s Afraid of Spatchcocked Chicken?

C Pam Zhang provides some interesting history, musings on language, a cookery lesson, comments on class, and some chuckles in this joyful piece that simply whips along. Next time you are preparing meat, this will pop to mind.

I lost weight my first few months at Cambridge, in part because my meals were no longer subsidized. Back at my American university, my need-based scholarship had covered on-campus food, as well as tuition and housing; in Cambridge, I faced the unpleasant discovery that food was not considered a financial need. Each dish of pudding or squash I placed on my dining hall tray increased my credit card debt. The price-to-calorie ratio of each bite I took in that gorgeous, centuries-old dining hall was sharper than my own hunger. It came to feel of a piece: that an empire unwilling to connect a piece of meat to the living animal from which it came would also refuse to connect the education of a mind to the needs of a body; would serve, with exemplary manners, each course over my left shoulder while ignoring, on the other side, centuries of colonial hypocrisies at home and abroad.

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The Protagonist Is Never in Control

In this spellbinding read, Emily Fox Kaplan recounts being emotionally abused as a child by her stepfather, a well-off surgeon. Written in second person, Kaplan masterfully explores the telling of her own story, taking back control of the narrative with clarity and bravery. It’s a tense read about childhood abuse, toxic family dynamics, and the power of a “bad man,” and Kaplan guides the reader through the piece with a bold, assured voice.

You figure out which genres you love and which ones you don’t. You like historical fiction, stories of brave, precocious kids in troubled times. You like science fiction, and series about normal kids with everyday problems — strict teachers, bullies, beloved pets who die. You don’t like the horror series that are popular with your classmates, written in a second person much too visceral for comfort, where the protagonist is never in control. In those stories, the worst things always happen off the page, leaving you to fill in the most terrifying details.

And then there are the stories where, midway through, the premise shifts beneath you, where you realize that everything you thought you knew was false. You learn that these stories have what’s called an unreliable narrator. These are the scariest stories of all.

You prefer fairy tales, with their strange logic and their consistent casts of characters: unloved children and evil stepmothers, all happening some place outside of time. As you get older, you seize upon stories that play with their tropes: the castle as a metaphor for loneliness, the princess who saves herself.

And you’ll realize, too, that a person can tell a story any way she likes; that the same story — a little girl who loves to read — can be told as a horror story or a fairy tale, depending on the choices of the author.

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Emergence

In this personal essay, Cherise Morris explores her family’s relationship to—and deep respect for—extreme weather, how Black communities have created homes in the most inhospitable places, and the importance of mutual aid and helping each other in times of climate crisis. It’s a beautiful, ultimately uplifting lyrical essay that’s part of Scalawag’s Salt, Soil, & Supper series on climate justice and the American South.

In the overgrowth of Cypress trees older than humankind, a vast expanse of marshy waters became a mirror. In the morass of swing limbs and undisturbed brush, there was a refuge to be found. The people who found it, the ancestors—familial or collective—who willed their freedom across untamed horizons, were called maroons. While there is no official record or documentation of these free people, history estimates thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of formerly enslaved Black folks made homes in the Great Dismal Swamp throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.

The news cycle after Hurricane Katrina was constant, a 24-hour-loop of rising flood waters, record high temperatures, “looting,” unsubstantiated claims of rape, murder, and lawlessness in the Superdome, where a city and country had abandoned its citizens. New Orleans, a city forged by Blackness, Black people, and Black culture became the epitome of a mythic recklessness. The recklessness born from the wrath of nature, the recklessness cradled by untamable waters, the recklessness bred by Blackness. Blackness, in this biased retelling, was an invasive plant watered by the floods, a plant left overflowing and uncontrollable.

But what the news coverage never showed was the ways Black people, at the nexus of nature’s calamity and systemic disinvestment, came together to care for one another, to look out for their neighbors who were also stranded, to plead for help together, and then, when they realized help wasn’t coming, to become that help themselves.

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I Evacuated From Yellowknife This Summer. Coming home Was The Hardest Part.

A harrowing account of an evacuation from Yellowknife, Canada, as wildfires rip towards the city. Jessica Davey-Quantick’s trauma is clear, and her message is desperate. A powerful piece.

When it was time to go home, after 35 days on shift, that gut-twisting fear came back. I knew too much and too little: I knew enough to be terrified that this was too early, that the highway through the South Slave up to Yellowknife was still unsafe and threatened by winds like the ones that had sent us all out of the territory in the first place. But I didn’t know what I’d be coming home to. 

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My Brain Doesn’t Picture Things

Marco Giancotti’s brain can’t imagine a sunset, the sound of a bell, the smell of bread baking, or little else. In this fascinating piece for Nautilus, Giancotti introduces us to aphantasia, a condition that prevents him from picturing any “kind of sensory stimulation” in his mind.

…as soon as I close my eyes, what I see are not everyday objects, animals, and vehicles, but the dark underside of my eyelids. I can’t willingly form the faintest of images in my mind. And, although it isn’t the subject of the current experiment, I also can’t conjure sounds, smells, or any other kind of sensory stimulation inside my head. I have what is called “aphantasia,” the absence of voluntary imagination of the senses.

My whole life, I’ve been aware—sometimes painfully so—of my own peculiarities, strengths, and weaknesses: A terrible memory, a good sense of direction, and what I felt was a lack of “visual creativity,” among others. I always thought these were just random, disconnected traits, and didn’t think much about them. Who doesn’t have their quirks?

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