I can think of no artifact in recent pop culture memory as confounding or outright baffling as Yellowstone. Like “Two-Face” of Batman mythology, you don’t know which persona you will get, whether within the span of a few episodes or even a few minutes. It is not just smoke: Taylor…

Breonna Taylor is dead — not as a character in fiction, or as a symbol or allegory of anything. Her death is a thing to be grieved on its own terms, and the loss of any human life does not require the burden of any additional “meaning” in order to…

Two years ago, I sparred publicly with Jerry Falwell Jr. for a week or two, igniting a heated debate on campus at Liberty University that spilled over into national media. I had gone to see my friends Johnnyswim (Abner and Amanda Ramirez) in concert at Liberty University, when I was…

The monsters are surfacing, and we wait to see who will win — Because the fundamental character of human existence is jagged, nonlinear, and complex rather than simple, and every person is a mystery, most especially to themselves, finding a narrative that makes sense of the world is mostly a child’s game of playing pin the tail on the donkey while blindfolded—it’s arbitrary. …

Our competing realities share one thing in common: they invite us to undergo the demything of America — We live and die by narrative. Our lives are constructed largely not by what happens to us, but by the stories we tell about what happens to us. This is why language matters, why words matter, and why there’s never “only rhetoric.” Whoever tells the narrative — by what means…

“He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.” — Isaiah 53.3 “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to…