Top Boy is one of the best shows I’ve seen this year, but no one seems to be talking about it.

Mostly, Joker was what I expected it to be.

Last Saturday—October 12—was my one-year wedding anniversary. My wife and I made a whole day out of it, doing lunch, dinner and getting our staycation on at a hotel in downtown Washington, D.C., and hitting up a speakeasy for the nightcap. One thing we did early in the day was a couple’s massage at a spa located in…

It was somewhat disconcerting for my cousin, a cop in Washington, D.C., to attend my book event at Politics and Prose in March. Not really for me, since I knew he was coming. But when he walked in towards the end of my talk—in full vested, booted and armed cop gear—the atmosphere shifted, and I watched the (mostly…

At my daughter’s elementary school, they have a pretty cool program that has the potential to pay dividends far down the road. When you get to fifth grade, you are paired with a kindergarten buddy, and every few days during your fifth-grade year, you and your buddy get to hang out and do projects together. For…

Perhaps the most telling aspect of thrift shop fedora repurposed as a strip club daytime shift buffet tray with sentience Jason Whitlock’s continued descent into Take Perdition is that there’s no variance with him. For someone who frequently decries SJW groupthink, he’s as predictable as a burp after a sip of soda.

Tact is a lost art and so is professional pettyism within the workplace. Anyone employed in a semi-reputable work environment will tell you that email wars are real—very real.

Joe Biden has settled into the BarcaLounger and Burn Notice phase of his life. Which is fine! My dad is there too, and in a slightly less-imperfect world, they’d be going on adventures to the mall and linen-soaked jazz cruises together. Instead, Joe Biden is running for president of the United States. And, well,…

So before I write this thing, I have to admit that, right now, I’m about to do a version of a thing that deeply annoys me. Someone will write a thing. (Let’s say about libertarian marsupials.) And the people who care deeply about libertarian marsupials will respond to that thing. Maybe they’ll leave comments on the…

Netflix’s original series, Raising Dion, dropped on Friday, October 4, and became my newest binge. I watched all nine episodes over the weekend and now I feel like talking about it. While watching, I made some observations that I’ve turned into very black reasons to check out the series. I wanted to share them with…

Kanye West will come out with an album…at some point.

The conversation about Brandt Jean’s hug of convicted murderer Amber Guyger has mostly cannibalized both the news of the (still surprising) conviction and the (not surprising at all) sentence. The image of the act is both explosive and saccharine; a molotov cocktail dipped in high fructose corn syrup.

I don’t pretend to know the mechanics of how most things work. I don’t know why nutmeg matters so much when making french toast, how rainbows are always perfect arcs, or even how Travis Scott has become a megastar when the best parts of his rap albums are when Travis Scott is not rapping. But I don’t need to know…

Any black person who has embarked on a natural hair journey can inform you that afro-textured hair is work. After going natural over five years ago, I’ve spent countless hours experimenting with everything from DIY avocado and banana hair smoothies to handheld hair steamers. I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time…

Back in 2017, I decided to give up watching NFL games for various reasons. Chief among them was that I didn’t like how the NFL was treating Colin Kaepernick in the wake of his nonviolent protests against police brutality and the (what appeared to me to be clear) collusion among team owners to keep him out of the…

I don’t remember exactly what Kotaku staff editor Natalie Degraffinried said a month ago when attempting to convince me to watch Succession. But knowing Natalie, I’m certain it involved some combination of “these white people” and “wild.” What I do remember was that she was the fourth or fifth black person in the last…

1. Chris Webber

I’m coming up on a year of marriage next month—Oct. 12, to be exact—and the year has flown by. Like I assume most couples do on the eve of that first year anniversary, we’ve both reflected (together and separately) on our journey into marriage and the year we’ve had. It hasn’t resulted in any grand epiphanies; we’ve…

I eat salads often now, because I have transitioned to a phase of my life where I’m expected to eat them often, and I don’t want to subvert those expectations. I’m so immersed in salad culture, so attuned to the salad zeitgeist, that my affinity for leafy greens lightly fondled by zesty liquids precedes me. When I…

I recently saw a Billboard article that ranked every song on Janet Jackson’s fourth studio album, 1989’s Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814 (we’ll just call it Rhythm Nation from here on out)—though I’m sure most folks think it’s her second album after her landmark album, 1986’s Control—and thought to myself that I…