Allen Iverson Cover Story, GQ, February 2023
It hardly feels possible that he’s been out of the league for over a decade now. For many of us, he was a meteor across our youth, the underdog the NBA didn’t know it needed, the prototype for the perpetually moving, bucket-getting, lane-slicing, fast-breaking, no-look-passing point guard. His first step was science fiction. He toyed with defenders, warned them his glitchy crossover was coming and still vanished.
How “Winning Time” Bottled the Magic of Showtime Lakers Basketball, Vulture, March 2022
Recreating the speed and skill of professional basketball onscreen is a difficult proposition. In much of the grainy 1980s game footage available on YouTube, you can feel the frazzled operators always a beat behind Magic’s misdirections, whipping the lens a split second too late to capture the ball as it reached its target…
The Comorbidities of the National Football League, The New Yorker, July 2020
Current N.F.L. players have said that they will take up Kaepernick’s protest for Black lives along the sidelines if the 2020 season proceeds as scheduled—“We’re all getting ready to take a knee together going into this season, without a doubt,” the Washington running back Adrian Peterson said—but it’s less clear whether these players will be able to resist the league’s plans to return to business as usual.
Ways to Keep Breathing, Oxford American, Issue 109/110 (August 2020)
Ahmaud Arbery had been on a run, losing his breath in controlled bursts, gaining it back in surges of adrenaline, until his breath and the cosmos which created it became one. You use the foot-strike your friend taught, landing on the balls of your feet, which changed your stride forever, helped you run longer, faster, safer. For the past three months, maybe you have been afraid of going outdoors. Since the threat of contagion descended on your neighborhood, desolate streets were haunted by the wailing of ambulances…On what would have been Arbery’s twenty-sixth birthday, your cousin—who would turn twenty-six later that week—puts on headphones and retraces Arbery’s run around the sidewalks of the neighborhood, except he comes home alive, his grief close and warm as the breath trapped in his mask.
The Liberated Life of Kendrick Sampson, GQ, June 2020
To understand the abolitionist approach Sampson hopes to bring to Hollywood is to understand the Juneteenth holiday, which celebrates the liberation—thirty long months after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed—of the last enslaved Black people in Galveston, Texas, where Sampson used to take family trips. “It wasn't the man that signed the bill that went to free those slaves,” he says of what Juneteenth commemorates. “It was a fight, and a coalition of abolitionists that made sure every slave was freed, and knew that if one of us is still in bondage, all of us are still in bondage.”
What Cornrows Mean, GQ, June 2019
Tewodros II’s curly black-gray locks serve as more than a reminder of brazen colonial pillage. (How many other locks of his hair are, today, secreted away in safes across Britain?) They also made uncomfortably literal the violent taking—supported by white supremacist systems—that’s shadowed Black creativity and progress whenever it has flourished.
Father Bread, Addis Ababa Noir, August 2020
The problem was simple: the boy did not want to be adopted and did not want to leave the orphanage. For a while, Abba Dabo thought he was just being stubborn, that he could convince the boy over time to embrace the idea of a new life with a new family. But the boy had refused every call with the Americans, even turning down a pair of sneakers Abba Dabo had tried to bribe him with earlier that week. Soon, Abba Dabo’s worry transformed into rage.
The Good Plan, McSweeney’s 58, December 2019
There was more wisteria snaking up and down a broken escalator, and two deer stood watching us cautiously from a raised flower bed across the skylit atrium, and flowering stalks covered the length of what had once been a cosmetics counter. The land was remembering itself. In the middle of the wishing fountain, a fruiting tree shot up from a heap of untouched coins. “Stop,” I shouted as Luam reached to pluck a pale yellow fruit from the tree’s branches. “You don’t know who that belongs to.”
Ethiopian Enterprise: Artists Build a Future in Addis Ababa and Beyond, ARTnews, July 2018
For [photographer Aida] Muluneh, art and arts education are not academic exercises to be confined to galleries and classrooms, which can be forbiddingly exclusive spaces. “Regardless of circumstances, our innovations and creativity manage to shine through,” she said of herself and her fellow Ethiopians. “It’s not based on the level of education or how much money you got or what kind of space you’re in—if you’re in a city that understands your work or not. It’s just the need to express, which to me is very African.”
On Owning Many Books, Popula, March 2019
I carried the book around because I loved it, and for the same reason my younger brother wore his Public Enemy shirt to class, to announce myself in a whisper: I was a reader, a black reader. I renewed Hughes from the school library for months, wandering with him down the divergent phases of his poetic career towards my own graduation and imminent departure for New York, the dreamer, the lyricist, the communist. It was not lost on me that I was able to keep checking it out because no one else at school requested it.