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L.A Weather (16 of 26)

María Ampara Escandón loves Los Angeles. More importantly, she understands it. Her novel, L.A. Weather, is about family and the subtle nuances within each relationship. It’s also about identity, the hold that secrets can have over us, and how we handle the crises that can face a family unit in any given year. Los Angeles is where the Alvarados happen to live in this story. This city I love is…

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Alive in the Room

This past Wednesday, my family hosted a musical tribute to my father, Kevin Toney. I wasn’t an active participant in the production or planning. Outside of doing half of a rough draft of a script for the M.C., I tapped out. “This is not for us,” I said. “This is for everyone else.” It was more than that, of course. It was my mother’s gift to his musical legacy. The show was a retrospective of…

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Kendrick Lamar's West Side Rallying Cry

On my 20th spin of Not Like Us, I figured out why Kendrick Lamar‘s latest is so electrifying. The last time LA hip hop was up was Nipsey Hussle’s Victory Lap at the GRAMMYs in February of 2019. His death a couple of months later, followed by Kobe Bryant, his daughter, and several others less than a year later, turned the city and the music melancholy and insular. The pandemic would soon follow,…

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Am I an AI Skeptic or Optimist? Yes

I’m an AI skeptic. That’s not true. I have been cautious about rapidly incorporating AI tools into my everyday work, even as usage and excitement by others have grown exponentially in the last year. Recently, though, I’ve been playing with AI solutions more frequently. I’ve been frustrated with the quality of Google search results and started exploring Perplexity AI. It was helpful when I looked…

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No One App to Rule Them All

It's been a while since I gave up on Evernote. I think I've finally figured out what will work for me now.

Photo by Walling on Unsplash I have been searching for an app to replace Evernote for quite some time now. Although I thought Notion was the one, I eventually gave up after using it for nearly two years as it was too heavy for personal use. First, I stopped using it to capture my “read later” links. Instead, I used bookmarks and read later in Safari until I stumbled across Anybox in a…

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In her book “My Black Country,” which shares its name with her new compilation, Randall posits a sharp rejoinder to the standard country origin story.

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"I think that Beyoncé — like Taylor Swift — loves nothing more than to prove herself in situations where she is perceived as an underdog. But also, like Swift right now, Beyoncé is in a position of such cultural, commercial, and critical dominance that there are not a lot of arenas left where she can convincingly play David rather than Goliath. In this sense, the systemic racism of the mainstream country music establishment — and American history writ large — is a worthy and appropriately sized foe. Backstage hangers-on lusting after her billionaire husband? Maybe not as much. While the libidinous Yoncé is usually one of my favorite Bey alter-egos, I do find myself wishing this album were a bit less about what’s happening in the back of the limo and more about what’s happening on the streets outside it."

Lindsay Zoladz on "Cowboy Carter"

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"I am more than fine with signing on to the Beyoncé legacy project, which promises to reclaim Black art across genres that have erased Black contributions. That is noble. But she has also worked hard to elevate a very specific era of a young female singer’s career — that sanitized expression of girlhood — into something more expansive. She chose to do that through Black art, leaning into her Southernness, accent, and lower vocal range instead of becoming a more palatable post-racial pop star. On this album, she makes a case for why, instead of simply embodying the latent politics of pop, house, and country, she’s choosing to transform them into something else. The result is an eminently enjoyable album with some imperfections but an indication of what could be possible if more artists follow her lead."

—Tressie McMillan Cottom on "Cowboy Carter"

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“Whiteness, masculinity, and Christianity are becoming more tightly yoked in the public imagination, with people hyper-invested in one category apprehending a need to invest in the others outwardly. These are historically knotted categories, the very concept of race an outgrowth of gendered Christian thinking about Jews. As scholars like M. Lindsay Kaplan, Willie James Jennings, Magda Teter, and Tudor Parfitt have shown, conceptions of Jews as dark, weak, fleshy, and fated to servitude were extended to debase people of color and authorize their enslavement. American legal arguments about the inferiority of Black people, such as the Dred Scott decision, echoed European arguments about the inferiority of Jews. So it’s ironic that Candace Owens, a Black woman, would seek to “own” Shapiro, a Jewish man, with the phrase “Christ is king.” It’s also a sign of just how badly some right-wing influencers will contort themselves for acceptance by the white boys online.”

—Audrey Clare Farley on the rise of “Christ is king” as an anti-Semitic slur

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"We keep secrets because we are ashamed or afraid; we tell them because we want an escape. We want to feel accepted and seen. Naturally, we share some secrets with our friends and partners, but sometimes those relationships are the source of a secret, so instead, we seek out neutral interlocutors. A bartender in Las Vegas told me the same client came, week after week, to talk specifically with him about her anxiety and troubled dating life. A hairdresser in Salt Lake City told me that Mormons grappling with their faltering faith came to her, an ex-Mormon, to work through family conflict. A therapist I met in Arkansas observed that many of her clients were leaving Christianity and using therapy as their new religion, which she found “a little spooky.”

When I asked what she meant, she told me that people, ex-Christian or otherwise, often look to therapy to find a source of meaning and release in their life—to fill a spiritual and emotional vacuum. Evangelicalism, she said, values “inappropriate vulnerability,” where people share testimonies and break boundaries in public venues. She’s wary when she hears those same stories within the context of therapy—when clients come in and feel obligated to spill everything up front, then ask for cures to their emotional ailments."

—Meg Bernhard on the limits of limitless disclosure

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"Reading [Audre Lorde]'s journal entries from her three-year-long battle with Cancer made me—for the first time since losing her—sit with just how afraid my Gramma must have been when Cancer came for her. I've sat with and mulled over my own fear and acceptance of losing her a million times, but never how afraid she must've been while losing her independence, her home, her way of being and doing. My Gramma was so many things, but fearful? My mind had to stretch far and wide to hold space for that."

—Trey Washington

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On Kevin Toney

It wasn’t every day that I would join my dad on his doctor’s visits, but on one of those rare occasions, we met with a new doctor who said, “Men our age have to figure out life in retirement.” My dad’s voice, though weakened, still carried the strength of his spirit. ‘I’m not retired,’ he declared, ‘I’m a musician, composer, conductor, and author.’ His words were a testament to his unwavering…

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Afrofuturism is a way of thinking about the future, with alternate realities based on perspectives of the African diaspora. It integrates imagination, liberation, technology and mysticism.

Imagination is important because it is liberating. People have used imagination to transform their circumstances, to move from one reality to another. They’ve used it as a way to escape. When you are in challenging environments, you’re not socialized to imagine. And so to claim your imagination — to embrace it — can be a way of elevating your consciousness.

What makes Afrofuturism different from other futuristic takes is that it has a nonlinear perspective of time. So the future, past and present can very much be one. And that’s a concept expressed in quantum physics, when you think about these other kinds of realities.

Those alternate realities could be philosophical cosmologies, or they could be scientifically explained worlds. How we explain them runs the gamut, depending on your basis for knowledge.

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Young Woman With Peonies, 1870

Frédéric Bazille (b. 1841). At the National Gallery of Art.

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Good Good

We ain’t good good, but we still good. Usher Photo by visuals on Unsplash I’m currently in Bedroom Jail. I can no longer count myself among the NOVID crowd as I tested positive for COVID-19 Wednesday evening. I probably contracted it on January 1st. Happy New Year! I’m not alone. My case has been mild so far, with two rough nights of sleep (last night was better) and a fever for about 36 hours…

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The Next Episode

The 2023 Lessons Learned The clock is ticking. Be your whole self in all places and spaces. Don’t carry anger that is not yours. The 2024 Operating Plan Personal I will fight against inertia by being more deliberate with my time. Time is not an infinite resource, and the contours of life can change rapidly. Do what serves your heart and spirit and gives your life meaning. Remove what…

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2023 in review - Life Will Be

Personal I turned 48 this year and celebrated with my family at Mother Wolf—a restaurant selected by my sister and that you may have read about recently. It was a rainy day, but it was a lovely, quiet way to spend it, given what the rest of the year would bring. Tiffany and I traveled to Paris and Barcelona in May. We took a cross-country train ride that delighted me. I spoke bad French and…