Once, while researching a piece for the New York Times Magazine , I came across a debate between William Styron and Ossie Davis moderated by James Baldwin. The reason for the debate: Styron, a white guy, had written a first-person historical novel from the point of view of Nat Turner…

We approach the time of year when we have all been tricked into linking together the buying of things with the genuine expression of love and there seems to be no way out of it. I (barely) survived a giant family fight with one of my teenagers this week —…

I’m so sad to be doing this again. Again, and again. I know that death happens, but in a country that is always trying to separate us from our humanity, Black death always feels personal. This is probably because we resist by surviving. We resist by loving unabashedly, laughing at…

I write about beautiful things because I live in an ugly place in an ugly world. Where every corner I pass has the story of a black person’s murder written upon it and then erased, where men broke into my daughter’s school in ski masks just last week and she…

The way the crows fly in an angry circle over the hill near the hospital every evening around this time, 4:30pm — 4:45pm. They yell and scream, their cries echoing from the church and the Whole Foods. Soon enough, the entire circle moves westward, though they stay connected. The formation…

I went to a museum of smells the other day. It was precisely what you’d expect from a museum of smells: wild and weird, somewhat beautiful. It turned out to be less a museum of smells than a museum of perfumes and their essences, a history lesson of the particular…

Did you know that love is meant to be liberation? Yes, I forget that sometimes too. Did you know that love lives in the body? Yes, this I also forget. Did you know that love is beyond language, even though we are forever trying to find language for it? It…

My son is eighteen years old and has graduated from high school. With no current college underway, he is working at a restaurant, living at home and facing down an uncertain adult life in an uncertain time. He wants to be a creative professional, which I also happen to be…