Commonplace

Ta-Nehisi Coates, “My President Was Black,” The Atlantic

What Obama was able to offer white America is something very few African Americans could — trust. The vast majority of us are, necessarily, too crippled by our defenses to ever consider such a proposition. But Obama, through a mixture of ancestral connections and…

Zadie Smith, “On Optimism and Despair,” The New York Review of Books

The art of midlife is surely always cloudier than the art of youth, as life itself gets cloudier. But it would be disingenuous to pretend it is only that. I am a citizen as well as an individual soul and one of the things citizenship teaches us, over the…

George Saunders, “My Writing Education: A Time Line,” The New Yorker

On a visit to Syracuse, I hear Toby saying goodbye to one of his sons. “Goodbye, dear,” he says.

I never forget this powerful man calling his son “dear.”

All kinds of windows fly open in my mind. It is…

Sylvan Esso, Genius comment on “Hey Mami”:

“But our hero, she don’t know the gravity she holds”

Sometimes there would be a pack of old men outside of the building who would look at me and say “Ugh, bless you.” It would make me feel like a million dollars. I realized that I didn’t think that…

Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Why Precisely Is Bernie Sanders Against Reparations?,” The Atlantic:

… Our current sprawling megapolis of prisons was a bipartisan achievement. Obamacare was not. Sometimes the moral course lies within the politically possible, and sometimes the moral course lies outside of the politically possible. One of…

Ryan Dombal, “True Myth: A Conversation with Sufjan Stevens,” Pitchfork:

Hanging from scaffolding on an in-progress luxury condo near Sufjan Stevens’ office studio in Brooklyn, a huge sign promises to “preserve the history but change the meaning.” The phrase is a euphemism for gentrification at its highest levels — an…