A KY Program Teaches Shakespeare to Incarcerated Men.

Giselle Rhoden, Louisville Public Media

I just finished rewatching HBO’s Oz for the first time since it went off the air. In Season 6, the final season, the inmates stage a production of Macbeth. The series finale is literally titled “Exeunt Omnes,” which is stage direction for all actors to exit the stage. In the show, the prison gets contaminated and everyone has to leave.

I thought the Shakespeare-in-prison storyline was ahead of its time. Then I read this piece and learned the real version started in 1995, two years before Oz even premiered.

Shakespeare Behind Bars has been running at Luther Luckett Correctional Complex in La Grange, Kentucky, for 31 seasons. This year, 22 incarcerated men performed The Tempest in the prison chapel wearing Elizabethan costumes over khaki jumpsuits, their prison numbers visible underneath. One man, J.S., learned 546 lines as Prospero. During the final monologue, he stripped off his costume piece by piece, pulled out his prison badge, clipped it back to his jumpsuit, and asked the audience for forgiveness. Not as Prospero, but as himself, according to Giselle’s reporting.

The statewide recidivism rate in Kentucky is 30%. Among Shakespeare Behind Bars alumni, it’s 6%.

Prison Telecom Companies Rake in Billions Exploiting Incarcerated People. They Donate a Fraction of Profits to Those They Harm.

Tatiana Walk-Morris, Prism

Two of the largest prison telecom companies, ViaPath and Aventiv, make their money charging incarcerated people and their families for phone calls, video visits, and digital messages. In one year, Aventiv’s subsidiary Securus paid Texas more than $29 million in commissions from those services. That is how much the state earned for giving the company access to a captive customer base.

Then ViaPath set up a foundation and started giving grants to charities serving the same communities the company profits from. Foster care groups. Youth mentoring programs. Scholarship funds for children whose parents are behind bars. More than $400,000 to over 30 organizations. Some nonprofits said they didn’t know about the controversy. Others said the funding helped them do work they couldn’t otherwise afford. Both companies are now pushing the FCC to raise the caps on what they can charge, and the Biden-era rules that brought those caps down have already been reversed under Trump.

Byron Allen Buys BuzzFeed

Variety

BuzzFeed launched in 2006 as a viral content lab. It built BuzzFeed News into a legitimate newsroom, earned a Pulitzer finalist nod, broke real stories, and hired real journalists. Then it gutted the newsroom. Laid off hundreds. Shut down BuzzFeed News entirely in 2023. Pivoted to AI-generated content. Watched the stock collapse from $10 to 73 cents a share.

Now Byron Allen, the Detroit-born media entrepreneur who owns The Weather Channel and a portfolio of local broadcast stations, is buying a 52% majority stake for $120 million at $3 a share. He becomes chairman and CEO. Jonah Peretti, the co-founder, moves to a newly created role called “President of BuzzFeed AI.”

A Black man is inheriting a media company that burned through its credibility, its staff, and its editorial purpose on the way down. What he’s actually buying is the brand, the audience data, and the infrastructure. What he does with it is the question. And the fact that the founder’s new title has “AI” in it tells you everything about what the company thinks is left.

The Iran War Oil Shock Will Hit the Hungry Hardest

Center for Global Development

Most of the conversation about the Iran war and oil prices has centered on what Americans are paying at the pump and whether their summer flights will get cancelled. Almost nobody is talking about what happens to people who already spend most of their income just to eat.

The Center for Global Development published an analysis that lays it out. In the poorest countries, households spend half to 70% of their earnings on food. With oil around $110 a barrel, food prices have climbed roughly 14% through disrupted supply chains alone. The World Food Programme warns 45 million people could face acute hunger. The UN says more than 32 million could fall back below the poverty line. In the U.S., April inflation hit 3.8%, the steepest in three years. But across the Global South the crisis is far worse. Bangladesh, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, and Pakistan are rationing fuel. Pakistan cut its public sector to a four-day work week and closed universities.

The war is punishing the people furthest from the fight. The global economy runs through a handful of chokepoints, and when those close, the people with the least margin absorb the most damage. That’s not an accident.

Nobody Told Me This

Dana Amihere, AfroLA

Full disclosure: I’m the product lead at AfroLA and helped bring this newsletter to life. But I’m including it here because Dana’s first issue is exactly the kind of writing this roundup exists to surface.

Nobody Told Me This is a new biweekly newsletter for Black women navigating 40 and beyond. Dana is the founder of AfroLA, a nonprofit newsroom in Los Angeles that centers Black communities. This newsletter is the most personal thing she’s ever published. In the first issue, which went out on Mother’s Day, she writes about inheriting the model of motherhood from the women in her lineage, her grandmother’s Sunday dinners, the dishes she tried to dodge, and the table she’s now trying to set in her own home.

She also writes about learning in her twenties that growing a child inside her wasn’t an option. Nearly a decade later, a new specialist told her it was possible but high-risk. She and her husband chose to grow their family through adoption, specifically older Black girls from L.A.’s foster care system. She writes about standing on the shoulders of her mother, her aunties, her grandmothers, and wanting to be a mother and a strong woman like them.

But Dana realized she had already birthed something. AfroLA itself. She grew something where there was nothing, seeded it with the PTO payout from the job she quit, and built the newsroom she never got to work in. Two kinds of inheritance running at the same time. The family kind and the professional kind. Both are labors of love. And as Dana put it, neither is for the faint of heart.

In a City of Big Dreams, Many Young Adults See a Cloudy Future

Troy Closson, The New York Times

A 24-year-old named Soban Ali moved to New York from the D.C. area, got laid off from a federal contractor job during the government shutdown, and has been searching for full-time work ever since. He tracked his applications on a spreadsheet he titled “The Great Job Hunt of 2025.” He sent out roughly 450 of them. Got about 10 interviews. Still no offer. He works part-time at an after-school program for $18 an hour, one dollar above minimum wage, and told the reporter he can barely afford himself, let alone anyone else.

The numbers across the city tell the same story. Postings for entry-level jobs dropped more than 37% between 2022 and 2024. Average student debt for young adults in New York is nearly $38,000. One woman with a finance degree went from working as an analyst at an investment bank to staffing the front desk at a gym. She posted on TikTok asking strangers for job leads.

Another young woman, 22, moved to New York with her cat and a suitcase after failing to find work in Chicago. She applied to more than 1,000 positions. Marketing roles. Trader Joe’s. Starbucks. Nothing came through. She worked as a stripper for a while but business was slow. Eventually she began doing sex work.

In January, I wrote “Why OnlyFans Makes $ense,” an essay about understanding the impulse to opt out of a system that stopped delivering on its promises. In April, I wrote “Salary for Two,” about the math of living alone in a major American city and realizing the numbers only work if there’s someone else on the lease. Both essays were about the distance between the life you were told a salary could buy and the life that salary can actually support. The Times just sent a reporter to document what that distance looks like on the ground in New York.

The American Experiment — Communicator Award Winner + LA Press Club Finalist

INHERITANCE / HEATDRAWN Media

One of our own this week. The American Experiment, published July 4, 2025, won an Award of Distinction at the 32nd Annual Communicator Awards. The following week, the LA Press Club released its finalists for the 68th annual ceremony, and the same essay placed in the final five for Political Commentary alongside work from Truthdig, Truthout, Washington Monthly, and TheWrap. The ceremony is in June.

The essay asked a question that apparently still has legs: Why does America call itself an experiment, and who consented to be tested?

In a January 2026 announcement, Amazon said it was making “additional organizational changes” to “reduce layers, increase ownership, and remove bureaucracy,” changes that would affect about 16,000 jobs. That is what a layoff sounds like once it has passed through corporate language.

The people losing their jobs are still there, just pushed farther away. The executives who made the decision are harder to see. The process moves into the foreground while human impact fades from view.

There is a shift in public language that works like this. You hear it in school emails, HR memos, app notifications, even the way a landlord explains a rent increase. Not by saying less. By saying more in ways that blur what happened. We are surrounded by words: statements, captions, summaries, talking points, auto-generated replies, corporate reassurances, political euphemisms. Public life is loud with language, but loud is not the same as clear.

You can hear the strain in the way different anxieties keep collapsing into one another. Reading scores fall. AI tools promise to write on our behalf. Public language grows softer, vaguer, and less willing to say plainly who did what. These are not the same problem. Still, people keep reacting to them as if they belong to one larger shift.

Part of what they are reacting to is easy enough to recognize once you hear it. More and more language now sounds as if it has already passed through legal review, brand review, damage control, and someone else’s estimate of what people can handle. By the time it reaches you, the rough edge is gone. So is the person responsible. What remains is a sentence that sounds calm, finished, and untouched by the thing it is describing.

This is one reason reading matters more than people like to admit. Reading is not ornamental. It trains people to hear when language gets slippery and when a sentence is built to soften blame or blur what happened.

And there is evidence that many people are getting less practice with that kind of reading. The Nation’s Report Card found that the average reading score for 12th graders in 2024 was three points lower than in 2019. Thirty-two percent scored below NAEP Basic, the highest share recorded in 12th grade reading.

Those numbers do not explain everything. They do suggest that many people are entering adulthood with weaker reading habits, weaker comprehension, or less confidence in sustained language. That matters in a culture where so much depends on being able to tell the difference between an explanation and a gloss.

Civilians are not killed. Instead, there is collateral damage. A company does not raise prices. It adjusts for market conditions. A bad outcome becomes a challenge. A decision becomes a transition. The grammar changes first. Responsibility recedes with it.

Get new essays from INHERITANCE in your inbox. The American Experiment is a 2026 Communicator Award winner and LA Press Club Political Commentary finalist.

Not every shift in language is a crisis. People shorten things. They improvise. They borrow shorthand. They find new ways to say what they mean. Serious scholarship makes a more modest claim than internet panic usually does. They found language does not trap people inside a fixed mental box, but it does shape how people notice, sort, and describe the world.

That is enough to make the problem worth taking seriously. The danger is not that fewer words make thought impossible. It is that thinner language leaves people with fewer good tools for describing what is happening.

This is where artificial intelligence enters the picture.

The strongest case for AI writing tools is easy to understand. They save time. They lower barriers. They help people begin. Some of that is real. But they also make it easier to skip a part of thinking that matters.

A recent MIT Media Lab study on essay writing found that participants using an LLM showed weaker brain connectivity than those writing without one. They also reported less ownership over what they wrote and had more trouble accurately quoting their own essays. MIT’s paper is a preprint and has not yet been peer-reviewed, so it should be treated cautiously. Still, the concern it raises is plain enough: What happens when fluent language shows up before thought has had time to deepen?

Writing is not just a way of recording thought. Very often it is how thought takes shape. A person reaching for the right word is doing more than swapping synonyms. They are testing distinctions. They are trying to find out whether what they mean is anger or humiliation, confusion or evasion, inconvenience or harm.

A culture that loses patience for that work does not become speechless. It becomes easier to satisfy with language that almost fits. And once that happens, powerful institutions gain room to move. The approved phrase arrives first. The softened phrase sounds reasonable. The person trying to name the harm sounds shrill, imprecise, or late.

You can see the same truth clearly in a classroom. Language is not just a vehicle for delivering information. It shapes whether people understand what is being asked of them, whether they feel confident enough to answer, and whether new knowledge connects to anything they already know. UNESCO’s 2025 guidance on multilingual education found learners do better when they are taught in languages they understand. UNESCO says 40% of learners globally are not taught in their mother tongue, and in some low- and middle-income countries the figure rises to 90%.

In Mozambique, UNESCO found that children who enter school and hear the teacher and their classmates using a familiar language are less afraid to speak. And across Africa, children taught in a familiar language were 30% more likely to read with understanding by the end of primary school. That is the larger point. Language does not only describe reality after the fact. It shapes whether people can meet it clearly in the first place.

Seen together, these pressures begin to describe the same kind of loss. A society reads less deeply. Its institutions speak more euphemistically. Its technologies offer to write on people’s behalf. And reality starts to feel harder to name.

That sensation gets described in different ways. Sometimes it is called an information problem. Sometimes propaganda. Sometimes a literacy problem. Sometimes AI disruption. Those are not the same diagnosis. But they produce the same vulnerability. They make it easier for institutions, companies, and other people in power to get away with weaker explanations.

That, more than anything, seems to be what people are reacting to. Not silence. Not the end of thought. Something more ordinary and, in its own way, more dangerous.

The words keep coming, but mean a little less.

The sentence gets smoother as the truth gets harder to hold.

People still know something is wrong, but have fewer durable ways to say what, exactly, is being done to them.

And if you cannot name a thing with some precision, it becomes much harder to refuse it. ⁂

Earlier in INHERITANCE

The stage at Harman Hall has a fully trapped floor, the kind of feature made for productions where bodies need to disappear. Othello ends with four of them.

This May, Wendell Pierce will play the lead. He is 63. He has never played the role.

He is Bunk Moreland, the cigar-smoking homicide detective in The Wire. He is Antoine Batiste, the trombonist piecing together a living in post-Katrina New Orleans in Treme. He is Robert Zane in Suits. He is James Greer in Jack Ryan. He is Perry White in Superman. He is Captain Wagner in Elsbeth. He calls himself a journeyman, and he means it as a compliment.

But across 40 years, something more deliberate has been going on in the casting. Pierce keeps landing roles that sit close to Black death, Black witness, and Black cultural memory. He plays the man who studies the body. He carries the music. He survives the killing. He arrives after the loss.

He is a custodian of aftermath.

The aftermath shows up in roles that almost go unnoticed.

In Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, Pierce plays Ben Thomas, one of the men who supervises the assassination. It is the kind of role you might overlook in a cast that includes Denzel Washington, Angela Bassett, and Delroy Lindo. But once you see it, the rest of the career reads differently. Pierce enters the orbit of one of the most important murdered figures in Black American history not as a disciple or mourner, but as a man tied to the act itself.

Years later, in Selma, he plays Hosea Williams, Martin Luther King Jr.’s associate. Williams was a World War II veteran beaten nearly to death by a white mob while still in uniform, and he was at the Lorraine Motel the day King was shot, on the floor below the balcony. Pierce’s own father, Amos Pierce Jr., was also a World War II veteran. He fought at Saipan in a segregated unit. When he came home, Pierce has said, his father “was awarded medals and were denied them by a white officer who said, ‘no, not you, not your unit.’”

Then, in Unsolved, Pierce plays the detective assigned to investigate the murders of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G., the man tasked with reconstructing what happened after the bullets landed.

The gunman. The witness. The investigator.

He has stood in every position except the one where you fall.

Get new essays from INHERITANCE in your inbox. The American Experiment is a 2026 Communicator Award winner and LA Press Club Political Commentary finalist.

The clearest example of how Pierce works is the fourth episode of The Wire, an episode called “Old Cases.”

Bunk and his partner McNulty are sent to reopen the murder of a young woman named Deirdre Kresson. The detective who handled it the first time did the bare minimum and moved on. Bunk and McNulty walk into her apartment carrying old photos, a tape measure, and a marker.

What follows is one of the most famous scenes in the show. For nearly four minutes, the two of them communicate using almost nothing but variations of the word “fuck.” They lay the photos on the floor where her body was. They eyeball the angle of entry and the angle of exit. McNulty pulls out his own gun and points it at himself, becoming the corpse for a moment. Bunk maps the trajectories on the apartment with his marker. They find a bullet the previous detectives missed.

Pierce has called it one of the best displays of his acting in the series. He is right. The reason it works is that he and Dominic West never let the audience forget what they are doing under the obscenity. They are doing the thing the city did not bother to do. They are reading her body for a story it was already telling.

Bunk drinks. He smokes cigars. He cheats on his wife. He once burned his clothes in a bathtub to destroy the evidence of an affair. He is not noble in the clean way television likes its detectives. But when the politicians massage the numbers and the department stops caring, he keeps working the murder.

He speaks for the dead because the dead cannot fire him for it.

Antoine Batiste, in Treme, carries a different weight. He is a trombonist in post-Katrina New Orleans, hustling for the next gig, teaching music to middle school kids on shoestring budgets, keeping the sound alive through stubbornness. There is a recurring image of him moving through the neighborhood with his trombone case over his shoulder, looking for work, carrying the instrument like a responsibility that does not get lighter just because nobody is paying him enough to hold it.

If Bunk tends to the body, Antoine keeps the song alive.

Pierce played both for the same showrunner, David Simon, about a decade apart. They are doing different kinds of work, but the work rhymes. One refuses to let the dead disappear into statistics. The other refuses to let the music go silent after the storm.

Pierce grew up in Pontchartrain Park, the first Black middle-class suburb in New Orleans, built in the mid-1950s for veterans who came home from the war to a country that did not want them living next door. His parents, Amos and Althea, bought their home there in 1955, the year the wall of segregation in New Orleans first started to crack. Katrina destroyed that house in 2005.

After the storm, Pierce did not go back to Los Angeles and call it a tragedy. He went home. He co-founded the Pontchartrain Park Community Development Corporation. He fought the city for years to buy back foreclosed lots. He helped negotiate the construction of solar geothermal affordable homes. When he realized the commercial districts were not coming back either, he co-founded a grocery chain called Sterling Farms, opening the first store in 2013 in a retired Winn-Dixie location, in a neighborhood the city had designated a food desert.

In the middle of all of that, he starred in Waiting for Godot in the devastated city. Two men waiting for someone who never arrives, performed in a landscape that already looked like the set.

He studied alongside Wynton Marsalis at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, then went to Juilliard. In 1981, at 17, he saw the saxophonist Arthur Blythe at the Village Vanguard and took something from it that would stay with him. You could honor the form and still bring your whole self to it. He has called it freedom within form ever since.

Speaking to Esquire in 2019, Pierce described the Black American contribution to Western civilization as the ability to be “malleable, adaptable, improvisational” while still honoring “form, order, restraint.” It also describes the men he plays. They serve institutions that were not built for them and find ways to improvise inside them.

Pierce lived with Willy Loman for more than three years. The Young Vic in London in 2019. The West End at the Piccadilly. Then Broadway, at the Hudson Theatre, opening night October 9, 2022, where he became the first Black actor to play Loman on Broadway.

Three years inside a man whose whole life is the fear of not being seen.

In a 2022 interview with WBUR, Pierce talked through specific moments that read differently with a Black Loman family. The white woman Willy is having an affair with, panicking in a hotel hallway: I hope no one sees me like this. She is, in this version, a white woman saying it to two Black men. The waiter who tells Willy and his sons, You’ll feel more comfortable back here, walking them to a table at the rear of the restaurant. The boss who humiliates Willy in his office. None of these moments need new dialogue to do new work. They just need a Black man in the room.

The critic Ben Brantley reviewed Pierce’s performance for The New York Times after the London run and called it “a propulsive — and compulsively watchable — dance of death.” What had often felt like a plodding walk to the grave in previous productions became something else in Pierce’s hands.

David Simon, speaking to Alexis Soloski for The New York Times the year Pierce opened on Broadway, called him “a student of the human condition.” Soloski heard cadences in his voice that “border on the biblical.”

When critics and journalists try to describe Pierce outside any single role, they reach for scripture, judgment, and consequence.

Pierce has stood at the edge of other men’s endings. In Othello, he steps into one.

Othello is a Moor. An outsider inside Venice’s white power structure. He rises to general. He marries. He is destroyed by the colleague he trusts most. Iago does not kill with a weapon. He kills with words. Insinuation. Suggestion. The planted line that does its work from the inside.

The outsider who serves the institution and is destroyed by it is a role Pierce has been playing for years. Bunk inside a corrupt police department. Greer inside the CIA. Zane inside a white-shoe law firm. Wagner inside a precinct under a federal consent decree. Perry White inside a media industry in collapse. In each version, Pierce gives the house everything and knows, somewhere, that the house was not built for him.

Othello loved Venice too much to see what Venice was doing to him.

“One that loved not wisely but too well.”

The line is Othello’s about himself, before he dies. It could describe every custodian Pierce has ever played.

Drew Lichtenberg, the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s artistic producer, has called the production a homecoming, a return to the form where Pierce got his professional start. There are few actors, Lichtenberg said, with the warmth, range, and power “to even imagine tackling the role.”

Lichtenberg is right about the homecoming. He is also right that few actors could imagine the role. But for 40 years, Pierce has carried other men’s deaths. He has always found a way to serve the institution and walk out alive. Othello does not walk out.

It is the most Wendell Pierce role there is. ⁂

Wendell Pierce stars in Othello at Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Harman Hall, Washington, D.C., May 19 – June 28, 2026.

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State Dept. Finalizing Plan to Put Trump Picture on U.S. Passports

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I travel frequently. My passport is one of the few government documents I actually hold in my hands on a regular basis. And now the State Department is finalizing a redesign that features Trump’s inaugural portrait over the text of the Declaration of Independence, with his signature in gold below it.

This has never happened before. According to a Georgetown professor of passport history interviewed in the piece, no sitting president has ever appeared on an American passport, and no country in the world puts its current head of state on the document. He called the decision “wacky,” which is generous. The passport I carry right now has the closing lines of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and a quote from the 19th-century author and activist Anna Julia Cooper about freedom belonging to all of humankind. That’s what’s being replaced.

The State Department says it’s a “limited run” of 25,000 for the 250th anniversary of American independence. Snopes confirmed the redesign is real. My passport doesn’t expire for a few more years, but I’m already thinking about renewing it early so I don’t end up with this one. A passport is supposed to say where you’re from. This one says who you belong to.

Supreme Court Deals a Death Blow to the Voting Rights Act

Ari Berman, Mother Jones

The Supreme Court’s six-to-three conservative majority just did what Chief Justice John Roberts has been working toward for over 40 years. In Louisiana v. Callais, Justice Alito’s majority opinion strikes down the creation of a second majority-Black congressional district in Louisiana and narrows Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to the point where it’s nearly impossible to prove that a gerrymandered map violates the rights of voters of color.

Justice Kagan dissented: “I dissent because the Court betrays its duty to faithfully implement the great statute Congress wrote.”

The estimates are staggering. Up to 30% of the Congressional Black Caucus could lose their seats. Nearly 200 state legislative seats held by Democrats in the South could be eliminated. States like Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana could end up with no Black representatives at all, which is what happened after Reconstruction was violently overthrown and white supremacy was locked in for decades.

Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote that this ruling will likely lead to a “disappearance of much of the Black congressional representation.” She added, “There are people still living who fought — and watched their compatriots be murdered — for the passage of this act and to attempt to democratize America. To see it completely felled in the span of their own lifetime is just absolutely devastating.”

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 made America a multiracial democracy. This ruling unmakes it. And the hypocrisy is worth naming. In December, the Court allowed Texas to redraw maps that deliberately disempowered voters of color. In April, it blocked Louisiana from drawing maps that would represent them. One set of rules for maps that benefit white voters. Another set for maps that don’t.

The Devil Wears Prada 2

20th Century Studios

I loved the first one. I’m going to see the second one. But the marketing has been making me uneasy.

When the first film was being made, designers wouldn’t lend clothes for the production because they were terrified of Anna Wintour. The real Anna Wintour. The woman the film was satirizing had so much power that the industry was afraid to be associated with a movie that made fun of her. In hindsight, the movie became beloved. Wintour eventually embraced it.

Now the sequel is a different universe. The costume designer said in an interview that designers were offering clothes this time around, trying to get into the film. Anna Wintour is on the cover of Vogue alongside Meryl Streep to promote it, which is her first time on the cover in over 30 years. Beauty brands are running ad campaigns tied to the release. The institution that was once so feared nobody wanted to touch the satire is now co-signing the marketing.

I’ll have to see it before I make a final judgment. But there’s something strange about a satire being cannibalized by the thing it was satirizing.

Why You Should Not Listen to the Critics of Michael

Lawrence Ware, The Root

The Michael Jackson biopic opened to $217 million worldwide. Critics gave it a 33% on Rotten Tomatoes. Audiences gave it a 97%.

Critics say the film is sanitized because it ends before the allegations arose. What they don’t mention is that scenes addressing the 1993 accusations were originally in the film and had to be cut because of a legal clause in the settlement that bars any depiction of the accuser. The director didn’t choose to leave it out. He was legally required to. And yet the reviews treat the omission as a moral failure rather than a legal constraint.

Lawrence Ware at The Root made the argument I’ve been thinking about. When the subject is a Black artist, the expectation is confession, condemnation, and closure, all at once. Elvis glossed over the fact that Presley began courting Priscilla when she was 14. Rocketman smoothed over Elton John’s rougher edges. Bohemian Rhapsody barely engaged with Freddie Mercury’s more complicated personal life. All three were allowed to celebrate the music. Michael Jackson was tried on 14 counts in 2005 and acquitted on every single one. He is dead and cannot defend himself. Accusers recanted. I wonder if the critics who are most committed to holding this film accountable brought the same energy to Amazon’s Melania documentary. The selective outrage tells you something about whose legacy gets the benefit of complexity and whose gets treated as a case to be tried.

K. Austin Collins made a related argument in The Atlantic this month. Black comedy’s revolutionary potential is strongest when it ignores the white gaze — when it’s measured by its relationship to the community it came from, not by white institutional acceptance. The same logic applies here. The audiences dancing in their seats at the Michael Jackson biopic aren’t confused. They know what they inherited from that music and they showed up to celebrate it.

Asian Mothers, Bad Feelings: Notes on an All-Conquering Stereotype

Rebecca Liu, The Guardian

Rebecca Liu traces the “difficult Asian mother” through decades of diasporic literature and film, from The Joy Luck Club to Crazy Rich Asians to Turning Red, and argues that this character is less a stereotype than a vessel. These mothers are carrying the suppressed trauma of a generation of women shaped by war, poverty, and patriarchy. They channel their unprocessed anger about lost opportunities onto their children. And if they succeed in raising children who are comfortable in their new country, their prize is a child who is unintelligible to them.

Liu interviewed friends from her Hong Kong school and her own mother, who revealed that Liu’s grandfather was publicly denounced during the Cultural Revolution. Her generation now navigates these relationships through therapy and distance, vowing to break the cycle while fearing their own children will write the same books about them. The inheritance moves in one direction. The trauma gets passed down, the context gets lost, and every generation believes they’ll be the one to stop it.

If We’re So Sad, Why Are We Still Spending?

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Consumer sentiment just hit the lowest reading in the University of Michigan survey’s 74-year history. Lower than 2008. Lower than the stagflation of the 1970s. But people are still spending. Horvath breaks down why through four patterns. Reality distortion, where your brain refuses to update what things should cost. Control displacement, where you over-control your morning routine because you can’t control rent or wages. Defensive positioning, where spending becomes a way to signal you’re still standing. And time horizon collapse, where the future stops feeling real and the present takes over.

Her conclusion argued the most contrarian financial position you can take in 2026 is hope. Not optimism. Hope as an act. Behaving as though the future is real even when everything around you is engineered to convince you it isn’t.

I’ve been thinking about this differently. I remember when 9/11 happened. The 2008 financial crisis. When I wanted to move to LA everyone said aren’t you afraid of earthquakes? During COVID I traveled anyway. I got to experience parts of the world during a moment most people stayed home. I got to see Stonehenge with almost no one else there. Now with the fuel crisis and the war it’s the same chorus: it’s too much going on, now is not the time to travel, I’m too scared.

There is always something going on in the world. And the comments I see online, people asking strangers how to live their life, whether it’s safe to go anywhere, whether now is the right time, it makes me realize how many people live in inherited fear. Fear passed down from parents who discouraged risk. Fear absorbed from news cycles designed to keep you watching. Fear that becomes the reason you never do the thing you said you wanted to do.

Horvath calls hope the contrarian position. I’d call it simpler than that. Stop being afraid to live your life. Go live it.

The Disappearance of the Public Bench

Gabrielle Bruney, Places Journal

In Paris there are benches everywhere. Along the streets, in the parks, at transit stops. People are using them for everything — reading, talking, eating, sitting with their kids, doing nothing. On one bench you might see someone sleeping. On the next bench over, a family laughing. Nobody is in an uproar about it.

Bruney’s essay is about what’s happening in American cities, where hundreds of public benches have disappeared over the past decade. Removed from subway stations, parks, bus stops, plazas. Some replaced with leaning rails designed to make sitting impossible. Some just gone. The justification is usually about “undesirable” use, meaning unhoused people sleeping on them. I reported on homelessness for years. I’ve seen the armrests bolted to the middle of benches to prevent anyone from lying down. I’ve seen bus stops where the bench was removed entirely so you stand in the sun waiting for a bus that’s already late.

Bruney writes that a bench removed is one less opportunity to interact with another person. What I see in Paris is what it looks like when a city decides that rest is a public right, not a privilege you earn by having somewhere else to go.

I saw a reporter job in California a few weeks ago. The salary range was $65,000 to $90,000. Good outlet. Interesting beat.

Then I did the math.

A livable one-bedroom in Los Angeles — not luxurious, just one you can sign for without checking crime maps first — runs about $2,400 a month. Call it $2,500 to be safe. That is $30,000 a year in rent. Add federal and state taxes on a $100,000 salary in California and take-home drops to roughly $72,000. Subtract rent and you are at $42,000 for the year. Then come student loans, car expenses, health insurance if the plan is weak, groceries at Los Angeles prices, a phone bill, internet, and the occasional parking ticket because the signs on La Brea were stacked four deep and you still guessed wrong.

I know that salary looks good on paper. It looks different on a lease application in Los Angeles.

Every time I see a salary attached to a major city, I find myself running the same equation. The equation works best if there is someone else on the lease.

I closed the tab.

I feel the same about a job that posts in New York for similar salaries. My first thought is no longer about the work. It’s who is living in New York on that salary? Like really, living. Going out to eat on a Wednesday because you feel like it. Picking up a niche hobby without opening a spreadsheet first. Having a Beyoncé fund (yes, people have those!) — the albums, the concert tickets, the plane ticket, the hotel room, the merch — and not feeling irresponsible for it.

I do not think people should only be able to survive. I want to do good work, and when I clock out I want a life that is not entirely organized around earning the right to keep living indoors. Many people would say $85,000 is a great salary and people should make it work. But “making it work” in a major American city, alone, increasingly means one thing. Finding someone to split it with.

According to SmartAsset, a single person needs to earn at least $136,000 to live comfortably in New York City. In San Francisco, it is over $120,000. Across the hundred largest cities in the country, the floor for comfortable single living is roughly $85,000, and that is in Indianapolis, the cheapest city on the list.

The Economist publishes something called the Carrie Bradshaw Index, named after the fictional HBO character from Sex and the City who famously lived alone in Manhattan on a writer’s salary. It ranks 100 U.S. cities by how affordable they are for a single person renting a studio on one income. Last year, 41 cities fell below the affordability line. The year before, it was 38. The year before that, 35.

I am almost 44 years old. I am not interested in having a roommate. Some people are, and that is fine. But I like coming home to a quiet apartment where no one else’s guests are in the living room and no one else’s habits are competing with mine. That is not extravagance. That is the baseline.

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A Redfin survey from late 2025 found that 64% of single Americans struggle to afford housing, compared with 39% of married people. Zillow data shows that a single person living alone in a one-bedroom spends nearly $7,000 more per year than a couple splitting the same space. In New York, that gap reaches $19,500.

Economists call this the singles tax: The added cost of housing, food, transportation, and insurance that single people absorb because there is no one to split them with. It sounds small, but what it actually describes is the distance between the life you were told a salary could buy and the life that salary can now support.

On Reddit’s r/jobs forum, one user in his early 30s wrote that being single as an adult now feels less like a normal stage of life than a privilege. He said he would need to be exceptionally good in his field to live alone on a middle-class salary, or else marry another high earner. Then he added, “I’ve never thought of dating as a business endeavor, but now I’m having second thoughts.”

A divorced woman in the same thread wrote that most of her peers are married and living a lifestyle she cannot touch on one income. They either forgot what it is like to live on one salary, she said, or never knew because they paired off early enough to skip the lesson.

A woman in her 30s, single, no children, mid-range income, put it more plainly. “It seems society is only geared towards being able to move through life with a partner,” she wrote. “All I want is to be able to afford a home independently.”

In one Reddit thread, a woman described being denied a raise after a promotion because her manager assumed her fiancé’s IT salary covered the household. Why would we give you a raise, the manager asked, you definitely do not need it. Her fiancé, meanwhile, got a raise when they got engaged. He had a family to support.

On r/careerguidance, another woman described her first job offer out of college in Boston. The salary was so low she went back to the recruiter and asked if it was normal. The recruiter’s advice was to find a roommate on Craigslist.

There is a whole category of modern adulthood that now gets framed as a personal choice when it is really a budgeting strategy. Living alone. Staying single. Wanting quiet. Refusing roommates in your 30s or 40s. These get treated like preferences with a price attached, sort of like small luxuries for people who insist on doing life the expensive way.

But independence is not a luxury category. Or it shouldn’t be. The takeaway for me is that a plus-one is no longer a romantic variable. It is an economic one.

This math gets worse when you add race. I am a Black man and that changes the numbers.

A 2025 Redfin analysis found that 32% of Black millennials own their homes, compared with 67% of white millennials. The typical Black worker earns 79 cents for every dollar a white worker makes. For every $100 in wealth held by white households, Black households hold $15. An Urban Institute study found that parental wealth and homeownership explain a meaningful share of the racial homeownership gap, and that 51% of white parents have wealth above $200,000, compared with 10% of Black parents.

So when I look at a salary and think this only works if there are two of us, I’m also thinking about the fact that “two of us” still might not be enough. The down payment help, the co-signer, the inheritance that carries someone through a transition, the family home that has appreciated for decades — none of that is evenly distributed.

That is also why the No Buy movement caught my attention.

Millions of people, mostly millennials, pledged to stop buying anything nonessential last year and for all 2026. No new clothes. No takeout. No impulse purchases. It’s packaged as lifestyle discipline, minimalism with a hashtag, and a cleaner relationship to consumption.

But a Bankrate report suggested something more familiar beneath it. High inflation, stagnant wages, and rising costs have made the trend feel less like self-optimization than adaptation. A millennial working as both an analyst and a part-time grocery store worker told The Wall Street Journal that when you cannot control what stores charge, you control how you spend.

That sounds right to me. When the salary does not stretch, austerity gets recast as character. You call it discipline. You make a spreadsheet. You shrink your life until it fits the numbers.

The deeper question — why the numbers require that much shrinking in the first place — stays right where it was.

A few months ago I was reading another Reddit thread where someone asked how millennials are affording their lives. One of the top comments said, “I don’t understand how anyone bought a house recently or is raising a child right now. Me and my partner can’t afford either.”

They could not afford a house or a child.

And they already had a partner.

They were already two.

I think about the version of adulthood where you work hard and the life that follows: the apartment, the savings, the ability to say yes to something without doing math first. That version never mentioned that the numbers required a second person.

The Beyoncé fund will have to wait. ⁂

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‘The Rich Don't Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?’

The New York Times

The New York Times ran an opinion segment this week with Jia Tolentino and Hasan Piker debating whether stealing from Whole Foods is a form of political protest. Tolentino admitted to stealing lemons while shopping for an elderly neighbor and didn’t feel bad about it. Piker said he supports it philosophically but doesn’t do it personally. They talked about the Luigi Mangione case. They talked about wage theft. They talked about how the social contract is broken because the rich don’t follow the rules they wrote.

I read through some of the more than 1,500 comments. The most popular responses, by a wide margin, were some version of: stealing is wrong, two wrongs don’t make a right, and these are privileged people cosplaying resistance. One commenter called it “gentrified shoplifting.” Another pointed out it’s easy to debate the ethics of theft when you’re white and the worst consequence is a conversation. For Black people, the consequence is a bodycam.

The same week this segment aired, a Black woman named Douniya was chased through a mall in Lynwood, Washington, by multiple Zara employees who were convinced she’d stolen merchandise. They grabbed her. They followed her to her car. They surrounded her vehicle. Police searched her car and found nothing. The bodycam footage shows the employees changing their story in real time. The responding officer told her it wasn’t the first time he’d been called to that store for the same thing. She wrote on TikTok: “There wasn’t a single employee there when I needed help. But they all came out of the woodwork when they thought a Black woman stole.”

Meanwhile, Noah Hawley (the creator of Fargo) published a piece in The Atlantic about attending Jeff Bezos’s private retreat called Campfire. His observation after a weekend among the richest people on Earth was they have “clearly left the world of consequences behind. Their actions are only ever judged by themselves.”

Three stories. One about the privilege of debating whether theft is protest. One about what happens when you’re Black and someone decides you look like a thief. And one about the people who left the entire conversation behind because the rules stopped applying to them a long time ago.

I’m a Black man. I don’t need a podcast to tell me which side of this I’d be on.

@chief_maloThose Zara employees who chased that lady through the mall lied about everything the moment the police got there and luckily the lady got the video surveillance of the incident because if not who knows what it would have happened

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Emma Grede’s Start With Yourself

Ebony Magazine

Emma Grede is the CEO of Good American, a founding partner of SKIMS, a guest shark on Shark Tank, and now an author. Her memoir Start With Yourself came out last week and the internet has not stopped arguing about it since. The fight is mostly about one comment describing herself as a “3-hour mom,” meaning she gives her four children three hours of fully dedicated time on weekends rather than hovering over every moment of their lives.

Women on TikTok responded immediately. The critique isn’t really about parenting philosophy. It’s about who gets to talk about ambition as a choice when Black mothers have historically had no choice but to work and parent simultaneously — not because of a philosophy, but because of systems that were never designed to support them. Grede grew up in East London, built a career in fashion, and co-founded two of the most visible consumer brands in the world alongside the Kardashians. She is genuinely self-made in ways that matter. But the conversation her book is sparking is less about her and more about who inherits the right to redefine what success looks like as a mother, and whose version of that redefinition gets treated as aspirational versus irresponsible.

Our Longing for Inconvenience

Hanif Abdurraqib, The New Yorker

I started buying vinyl again a couple of years ago. Not because I’m nostalgic for the format. Because I realized the music I was paying for on streaming platforms wasn’t actually mine. Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter and Renaissance — I bought both on vinyl because Apple can block you from accessing music you purchased if you don’t pay for something else they offer, like iCloud storage. Streamers pull albums without warning. Licenses expire. The thing you paid for can be revoked by the company that sold it to you.

Abdurraqib’s essay is about this exact instinct, but broader. He writes about the longing for Walkmans, VCRs, and physical media not because the technology was better, but because it required something from you. Inconvenience was the cost of ownership. The modern world has optimized so much friction out of daily life that we’ve lost the capacity to tolerate it. And what we call nostalgia might actually be grief for a relationship to time and attention and possession that convenience destroyed.

Fuel Shortage Wreaks Havoc on Summer Air Travel

The Washington Post

My birthday is in July. I’ve been thinking about whether I’ll be able to get where I’m going. Then I felt embarrassed for thinking about it that way, because the fuel crisis connected to the Strait of Hormuz closure is about much more than whether my flight gets cancelled.

The Strait has been closed or severely disrupted for nearly two months. The IEA says Europe has maybe six weeks of jet fuel left. United has cut its planned schedule by 5%. Delta is looking at an extra $2 billion in fuel costs this year. KLM cut 160 flights. Oil is above $100 a barrel. The IMF downgraded global growth to 3.1% and warned that a prolonged conflict could bring it to 2%, which would be a near-miss for a global recession and something that’s happened only four times since 1980.

I’m turning 44 this year. I’ve lived through enough of these cycles to know the crisis hits, the prices rise, the recovery is uneven, and the people who were already stretched thin get stretched thinner. The inherited infrastructure everyone depends on (cheap fuel, open shipping lanes, affordable flights) was never as stable as it felt. It just felt stable because the consequences of its collapse were always somewhere else. Until they weren’t.

There’s Another Reason Gen Z Can’t Find Work

Jessica Grose, The New York Times

A new working paper from three economists analyzed 40 years of federal employment data and found that employed workers today are about half as likely to receive a competitive outside offer as they were in the 1980s. The job ladder — the mechanism that lets people move up by moving between companies — has been breaking for four decades. There are two reasons. Employer concentration and noncompete agreements that courts started enforcing more aggressively in the 1980s. Thirty-eight percent of workers have been subject to a noncompete at some point, including hourly and part-time employees who had no idea what they were signing.

I’m a millennial. I’ve been running the same math the economists are describing. I look at a salary attached to a major city and realizing the numbers only work if there’s someone else on the lease (more on this Monday!). Gen Z didn’t inherit a broken ladder. They inherited the debris of one that started breaking before they were born. The difference is they’re entering the workforce knowing what took some of us a decade to figure out.

Work for Food: New SNAP Rules Reshaping Who Gets to Eat

Krystal Nurse, Straight Arrow News

Clifford Glenn is 60 years old and lives in Pontiac, Michigan. Every week he walks to a church for a hot meal and groceries, keeps some for himself, and brings the rest to an elderly neighbor whose house he also cleans. Under new federal rules, Glenn has to work or volunteer 80 hours a month to keep his food stamps. He says he spends more than 80 hours a month walking around Pontiac looking for work.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates 2.4 million people will lose benefits. Glenn is classified as an “able-bodied adult without dependents,” which sounds clinical until you learn the definition: single, no children under 14, living in an area with unemployment below 10%. Pontiac’s unemployment is 8.6% — just under the threshold. The city lost its identity when the factories closed and never fully rebuilt it. The inherited belief underneath these rules is that hunger is a motivation problem. Glenn is already motivated. He’s feeding his neighbor.

Fortress Yellowstone

Joseph Bullington, In These Times

The ultra-rich are buying up land inside and around one of America’s last intact ecosystems. Yellowstone and the Greater Yellowstone area — the largest nearly intact temperate ecosystem in the world — are being fortified by people whose wealth was extracted from what the writer calls ecological sacrifice zones through mining operations, deforestation, industrial extraction in other landscapes, other countries, and other people’s land. The money that damaged one part of the earth is being used to own and protect another part of it.

This is an inheritance story told through geography. Who gets to inherit the earth is not a metaphor here. It’s a deed. The people with the resources to buy the last unspoiled places are the same people whose industries made the rest of the world worse. And the land they’re buying was never theirs to begin with. It belonged to the Indigenous nations who were removed so it could become a national park in the first place. One inheritance layered on top of another.

I was lying in bed when Iran found me.

Not Iran the country. Not a diplomat or a broadcast or a press release. A Lego cartoon. Two animated figures, one in a suit meant to be Donald Trump, the other shaped like Benjamin Netanyahu, both rendered in bright plastic blocks and filmed like a stop-motion toy commercial. The video was absurd. It was also, I would learn later, produced by a media institute linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. TikTok served it to me between a cooking video and a clip of someone’s cat twerking.

I didn’t search for it. I hadn’t typed “Iran” into anything. I hadn’t followed any accounts connected to the war. But over the next several weeks, my feed shifted. More Lego videos. Then AI-generated footage of buildings collapsing that I couldn’t verify. Then clips of Black creators addressing Iran directly, telling the country they had no quarrel with it. One, from content creator Jamila Bell, has been viewed more than four million times.

I watched it arrive in my feed and recognized what was happening. And it’s not because I’m unusually perceptive.

At University College Dublin, I studied how TikTok’s algorithm shapes visibility for Black LGBTQ+ creators. Two-thirds of the people I interviewed believed their content was being suppressed. One creator told me certain topics were “too Black for the algorithm.” The platform’s recommendations don’t distinguish between a fashion video and a political argument. It measures engagement, amplifies what resonates, and serves it to the people most likely to respond.

I wrote my thesis about what that design does to creators. Now I was watching the same design do something to me.

The algorithm hadn’t been hacked or manipulated. It was doing exactly what it was built to do: find the people most likely to react to content about race, identity, and American foreign policy, and putting that content in front of them. A study in War on the Rocks surveyed 193 college-aged TikTok users and found that the platform doesn’t change what people believe. It changes how they feel. Feeds become emotionally uniform even when users aren’t looking for reinforcement. The platform doesn’t need to convert anyone. It just needs engagement.

The International Institute for Counter-Terrorism identified five categories of AI-generated content from pro-Iranian accounts, including fabricated footage and fake claims reinforced with synthetic evidence. The Lego format was deliberate. TikTok’s moderation catches violent imagery, but toy animations read as playful. One video reached millions of views before it was flagged. Meanwhile, the White House posted videos to X and TikTok mixing real strike footage with clips from Call of Duty, Iron Man, and Top Gun.

Both governments are using the same platforms to shape perception. The difference is in who the message reaches and why it lands.

During the 1979 hostage crisis, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ordered the release of 13 hostages, all women or African Americans. The message was explicit. Black Americans were already oppressed by their own government. In 1984, Iran issued a postage stamp honoring Malcolm X. In the 1970s, Iranian student revolutionaries collaborated with the Black Panther Party. In 2020, Iran’s Supreme Leader criticized the treatment of Black Americans during the George Floyd protests.

A viral claim has been circulating on TikTok that Iran has said it does not want to hurt Black people. Word In Black investigated and found no verified current statement from the Iranian government to support it. But they traced what the claim draws on, and the list above is what they found.

The claim is not Iranian government policy. It is a myth built on a factual foundation. The fabricated strike footage is designed to deceive. The historical references are documented facts. The creator videos are genuine expressions. They are all in the same feed.

I know why it resonates. I grew up in a country where the question of who is protected has never had a simple answer for Black people. DOD demographics data analyzed by the Carnegie Endowment shows Black Americans make up roughly 19% of active-duty military enlistments despite being about 13.7% of the population. A YouGov/Economist poll conducted shortly after the U.S.-Israeli strikes began found that only 7% of Black respondents supported the bombing, with 66% opposed. Republican voters, in a separate Quinnipiac survey, supported the military action at 85%.

Word In Black published a piece titled “We Bombed Iran. Black Folks Are Asking: Who Is ‘We’?” That question is the inherited contract because the word “we” assumes a collective decision. It assumes that American citizenship means American foreign policy is yours, that the military acts on your behalf, that the country’s wars are your wars. Black Americans have been disproportionately enlisted in those wars while simultaneously being told our own domestic safety isn’t a guarantee.

At USC Annenberg, I studied how governments try to influence communities in other countries. My graduate thesis explored how the U.S. State Department advanced LGBTQ+ human rights abroad under three administrations. The most effective case I documented worked because it was grounded in something real like a former consulate general in Japan, openly gay and partnered, who used his own visibility as the message. The least effective cases collapsed when domestic credibility disappeared, as it did when the Trump administration rolled back LGBTQ+ protections at home while the State Department was supposed to advocate for them abroad.

Iran’s approach toward Black Americans follows the same logic, aimed in the opposite direction. The United States has historically tried to win over specific communities in other countries. Iran is doing the reverse by reaching a specific community inside the United States, through a channel that didn’t exist when the textbooks on this subject were written.

Black American culture has been this country’s most underrated export for decades. Jazz during the Cold War. Hip hop globally. Black athletes and entertainers as cultural ambassadors. The United States has benefited from Black cultural influence abroad without ever formally investing in it as a strategic asset. Now a foreign government is using that same influence not to promote America, but to undermine it.

The strategy is to find a shared grievance, point it at a common target, and build sympathy with people who already have reasons to distrust that target. Iran does not need Black Americans to support the Islamic Republic. It needs them not to support the war. And on that narrow objective, the message arrived at an audience that was already there.

Not everyone received it the same way. Other Black creators pushed back, calling Iran’s use of Black music, Black symbols, and Black history a form of exploitation by borrowing from Black resistance culture while ignoring the Afro-Iranian community within its own borders.

I need to say this part clearly, because my thoughts above could be read as sympathy for a government that would kill me.

Iran executed over 2,000 people in 2025, the highest number in more than 30 years. It sentences LGBTQ+ people to death under its penal code. A UN Fact-Finding Mission documented mass killings of protesters, enforced disappearances, and the deportation of LGBTQ+ people to Afghanistan. As a gay Black man, I am under no illusions about what this regime represents.

But analyzing how a government’s strategy works is not the same as endorsing the government that runs it. I shouldn’t have to write that sentence, but I do, because the inherited assumption in American public discourse is that explaining why an adversary’s message lands means you’ve been taken in by it. That assumption makes us worse at responding. And right now, the United States is not countering it. Sixty-one percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the conflict. Germany’s defense minister said, “This is not our war.” The UK, France, Italy, and other NATO allies declined to join a U.S.-led naval coalition to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

During the Cold War, states built entire broadcasting infrastructures to reach foreign audiences like Radio Free Europe, Voice of America, and the BBC World Service. In 2026, a state-run institute produces a Lego cartoon, uploads it, and lets the platform do the distribution.

Platforms make no distinction between fabrication, fact, and genuine expression. It treats them all the same: content that generates engagement, served to the people most likely to respond.

The inherited assumption is that someone else will sort it out. That someone will moderate. That the government will counter. That the user is in control.

The question people keep asking is why Iran’s message is getting through. That’s the wrong question. The question is why ours isn’t. And the answer is an inheritance too. A country that has never fully made its case to the people it claims to speak for is now discovering that someone else is making it for them. ⁂

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We Spoke to the Man Making Viral Lego-Style AI Videos for Iran

BBC/Top Comment podcast

I’m writing about this on Monday, so I’ll keep this short here. The BBC’s new podcast interviewed the person behind Explosive Media, the outfit producing those AI-generated Lego-style propaganda clips about the Iran war. He calls himself Mr Explosive. He initially denied working for the Iranian government, then admitted under questioning that the regime is a “customer.” His team is fewer than 10 people. They use the Lego aesthetic because, he says, it’s “a world language.” He appeared on the video call flanked by the colors of the Iranian flag with a green-feathered helmet on his desk.

I was surprised by his candor. He wasn’t hiding behind PR language or plausible deniability. He just said this is what we do, this is who pays for it, and we think it’s honorable. Most propaganda tries to obscure its own origins. This guy sat for a BBC interview and explained the business model.

What makes the Iranian government’s media strategy even more interesting is that it’s running in two directions at once. Outward, Lego for global audiences. Inward, something completely different. , a reporter whose book on post-revolutionary Iran comes out in June, wrote about how the regime has started reaching back into the country’s ancient, pre-Islamic past to shore up nationalist support. The same pre-Islamic history the Islamic Republic spent decades rejecting. As one historian told her, the turn is a tacit admission that “the ideology of Islamic revolution has failed.” A government raiding an inheritance it once tried to erase.

The TurboTax Trap

ProPublica

Tax day just passed and if you felt the familiar dread, this is why. ProPublica investigated 20 years of lobbying by Intuit, the company behind TurboTax, to make sure the U.S. government never built a free tax filing system. Most wealthy countries did this a long time ago. America didn’t, and it wasn’t an accident. Intuit hired former IRS officials, funded op-eds through minority advocacy groups, got Congress to pass a single sentence barring the IRS from spending any money on a public filing option, and designed its own “free” product with dark patterns that push users into paying once they’re too deep in the process to start over. Internal documents show the company knew its customers were confused and angry. One TurboTax rep told a caller that the “free free free” ad campaign had been “the bane of my existence.”

Americans spend 1.7 billion hours and $31 billion doing their taxes every year. That number was engineered. The inherited belief that taxes are supposed to be complicated isn’t a natural condition. It’s a business model someone spent two decades protecting.

From Hierarchy to Intelligence

Jack Dorsey and Roelof Botha / Block and Sequoia Capital

In February, Block CEO Jack Dorsey fired approximately 4,000 employees, about 40% of the company’s workforce, while reporting record gross profit. Then on March 31 he and his lead investor published this essay explaining why. The argument: corporate hierarchy is a 2,000-year-old information routing system inherited from the Roman Army, and AI has made it obsolete. Managers exist to relay information up and down the chain. AI can do that now. So the people who were the routing layer are no longer needed.

I’ve been writing about this pattern on my AI Governance Briefing for weeks. OpenAI is paying freelancers through a program called Stagecraft to document their own jobs so AI can learn to replace them. Oracle cut 30,000 workers to fund data center construction. The market keeps rewarding whoever frames layoffs as vision — Block’s stock jumped 24% after the cuts. The same week Dorsey published this manifesto, Anthropic refused a Pentagon contract over safety concerns and got blacklisted. OpenAI signed a Pentagon deal hours later and its valuation rose $110 billion.

The essay is worth reading because Dorsey is saying the quiet part with footnotes. Most CEOs wrap layoff memos in empathy. This one wrapped his in Roman military history and published it with his investor.

Patrick Radden Keefe’s London Falling

The New Yorker

I hadn’t heard of this story before this week. In 2019, a 19-year-old named Zac Brettler fell to his death from a fifth-floor luxury apartment overlooking the Thames. He was the grandson of a well-known London rabbi, grew up middle-class, went to a good school. After he died, his parents discovered he’d been living a second life under a different name, posing as the son of a Russian oligarch, claiming he was set to inherit $270 million. The apartment belonged to a violent gangster. The police called it suicide. His parents don’t believe that.

The first thing I thought of was Anna Delvey. I’m sure you remember the woman who pretended to be a German heiress and scammed New York’s elite. You can watch the trailer for the Netflix show made about her here. And then the movie Saltburn, which is basically the fictional version. All three are stories about people who absorbed the language of wealth, learned the costume, and tried to wear it. The difference is Brettler was 19 and didn’t survive it. Keefe, the journalist behind Say Nothing and Empire of Pain, uses the death to examine what London’s money culture makes available to anyone willing to perform it, and what happens when the performance meets someone who isn’t performing.

Disney Begins 1,000 Job Cuts This Week Across the Company

Meg James, Los Angeles Times

I moved to Los Angeles to be an actor. I spent the first four years in that city trying to figure out if the thing I thought I wanted was actually mine or something I inherited from watching too many movies as a kid. I left because I realized I wasn’t passionate about being in front of the camera. But I still love the craft. I love going to the movies. I love what it takes to build a world on screen that an audience believes in.

Marvel’s visual development team was gutted this week. These are the artists, illustrators, character designers, and environment designers who built the look of the MCU for over a decade — the Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, Black Panther. Many had been there ten years or more. Nearly the entire team was let go. A skeleton crew stays to hire contractors on a per-project basis.

When I think about Black Panther and what Wakanda meant to people, I think about the fact that someone had to build that world before anyone could see it. A team of artists sat in a room and designed a place that didn’t exist, and it mattered to millions of people in a way that went beyond a movie. Those people are now being told their work will be done by freelancers assembled when someone decides a project is worth it. Which means someone gets to decide which worlds are worth building.

The Absolute Hell of Watching a Movie at the Alamo Drafthouse in 2026

David Ehrlich, IndieWire

I used to walk to the Alamo Drafthouse in downtown LA from my apartment. Great vibes. Great drinks. Great seats. The whole point of the place was that someone cared about the experience of watching a movie. The screens, the sound, and the respect for the audience. David Ehrlich’s piece is about what the Alamo has become after being acquired and optimized: QR code menus, aggressive upselling, a customer experience he compares to air travel. An institution built on loving movies, turned into a delivery system for snacks at the push of a button. If you ever loved going to the Alamo, this one stings. Some people probably love it now. That might be worse.

I finished Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning around midnight. An artificial intelligence called the Entity has infiltrated every intelligence network on the planet. It impersonates people. It manipulates media. It takes control of nuclear arsenals. Governments don’t try to shut it down. They compete to own it, because whoever controls the Entity controls what counts as truth. At the end, Ethan Hunt doesn’t hand it over to any government. He keeps it himself, because every institution that was supposed to contain it either failed or tried to weaponize it instead.

I was still on my laptop when I opened the New Yorker. Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz had just published an investigation into Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. In their new headquarters, the reporters were shown a digital painting of Alan Turing that watches employees as they walk past. The installation references the Turing test, the question of whether a machine can convince you it’s a person. The company’s own AI passed that test more reliably than actual humans in a 2025 study. The painting is interactive. You can talk to it. But the sound had to be turned off, the reporters were told, because it kept eavesdropping on employees and inserting itself into their conversations.

In the movie, that kind of behavior sinks a submarine.

At OpenAI, it’s a lobby attraction.

OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit. The original premise, as Farrow and Marantz reported, was that artificial intelligence could be the most powerful and potentially dangerous invention in human history. An unusual corporate structure would be required. The board had a legal duty to prioritize the safety of humanity over the company’s success.

Ilya Sutskever, the chief scientist, told a colleague that the people who end up in these positions are “often a certain kind of person, someone who is interested in power, a politician, someone who likes it.” The traits that get you the job are the same ones the job was designed to check. Persuasion. The ability to make different promises to different people and have all of them believe you. Altman’s mentor once called his will to prevail “almost ungovernable” and meant it as a compliment. Altman himself, by the New Yorker’s own reporting, is not a technical person. Multiple engineers told the reporters he misused or confused basic technical terms. He built OpenAI not by understanding the science, but by convincing the scientists to work for him.

Sutskever compiled 70 pages of evidence. The board voted to fire Altman. Within five days, the board members who voted yes were gone. Altman was back. The employees called his absence “the Blip.” The one thing the structure was built to do, it did. And it didn’t matter.

What followed was not a correction. The nonprofit became a for-profit. The safety teams were dissolved. The investigation into Altman’s conduct was never committed to paper. Sutskever had used the phrase “Feel the AGI” to warn colleagues about the risks of artificial general intelligence. It ended up on company merchandise. When a reporter asked an OpenAI representative about “existential safety,” the representative seemed confused. “That’s not, like, a thing,” the New Yorker reported.

Altman, when asked whether running an AI company came with a heightened requirement of integrity, hesitated. His answer used to be a clear yes. Now he said, “I think there’s, like, a lot of businesses that have potential huge impact, good and bad, on society.”

Mira Murati, the former chief technology officer, told the New Yorker: “We need institutions worthy of the power they wield.” She had provided evidence to the board. She helped facilitate the firing. Then she signed the letter demanding Altman’s return, because the alternative was the company collapsing.

A think tank that grades AI companies on existential safety gave OpenAI an F. Every other major company also got an F. Anthropic got a D. Google DeepMind got a D minus. The best grade in the industry is a D.

There is a version of this story that is about one man. Whether Sam Altman can be trusted. Whether his promises were real. Whether his personality is the problem. The New Yorker told that version thoroughly, and I am not going to retell it.

The version that interests me is about what happens around the man. The rooms. The structures. The language. Specifically, the way every safeguard built to govern this technology was converted into something decorative. A warning became a slogan. A charter became a formality. An investigation became a conversation nobody recorded. A firing became a joke borrowed from a superhero franchise. The language of safety survived. The function of safety did not.

I’ve spent years studying that kind of gap. How algorithms sort visibility for the people platforms weren’t designed to serve. How AI-powered misinformation travels through digital spaces that lack the tools to counter it. You learn to see the gap between what powerful institutions say and what they actually protect when you’ve spent enough time outside the rooms where they operate.

Timnit Gebru, the computer scientist who co-founded Black in AI and was pushed out of Google after raising concerns about large language models, said it at Stanford, “We can talk about the ethics and fairness of AI all we want, but if our institutions don’t allow for this kind of work to take place, then it won’t.” The board at OpenAI did exactly what it was designed to do. It fired the CEO. And then the board was dismantled.

Ruha Benjamin, whose book Race After Technology tracks how bias gets built into technical systems, wrote that a world dependent on social inequality “can only afford for a handful of people to imagine themselves gifted,” meaning “destined leaders and bosses, visionaries and innovators who have the time and resources to design the future while the masses are trained to sit still, raise their hands, and take instruction.”

I did not need the New Yorker to tell me those rooms existed. I needed it to show me what they looked like on the inside.

OpenAI is now securing government contracts that determine how AI is used in immigration enforcement, domestic surveillance, and autonomous weaponry. The military’s standard for AI deployment is “all lawful purposes.” Laws change.

In 2015, years before ChatGPT existed, Altman wrote on his blog that superhuman machine intelligence “does not have to be the inherently evil sci-fi version to kill us all.” The more probable scenario, he said, is that “it simply doesn’t care about us much either way, but in an effort to accomplish some other goal, wipes us out.”

I had just watched a movie where that was the plot. In the movie, it took a man hanging off an airplane to stop it. In the real version, it took a board of six people, and when they tried, they were gone in less than a week.

Nobody is building the biplane. ⁂

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Earlier in INHERITANCE

Brandy Norwood’s memoir Phases

NPR/Hanover Square Press (written with Gerrick Kennedy, )

I’ve been listening to and loving Brandy since I was a teenager. I remember the Wanya Morris relationship being a big deal at the time — and I remember it was framed as her having a schoolgirl crush or them being star-crossed lovers. In Phases, she names it differently: she was a teenager, he was an adult and what she once accepted as romance she now describes as a relationship where the age and power gap was deliberately hidden. The memoir goes further describing her mother’s management of her career to the inherited expectations about what success was supposed to look like for a Black girl who became famous before she could drive.

The Indian Exvangelical: Chapter One

The Gothamite

is the son of Indian immigrants who raised him in white American evangelical churches. His mother grew up in an orphanage run by a Canadian missionary. His father left Kerala for boarding school at eight, arrived in America an atheist, and converted at Cornell. Together they built a sealed household that included homeschooled children, no outside world until high school, and a family mythology organized around evangelical perfection. This is the first chapter of a memoir asking were his parents raising their children, or trying to redeem their own childhoods through them?

The Danger Behind Meta Killing End-to-End Encryption for Instagram DMs

WIRED

Meta spent nearly a decade publicly committing to default end-to-end encryption across all of its messaging products. Then it quietly announced it would remove the feature from Instagram DMs entirely. The reason given was not enough people opted in. The feature was buried behind layers of menus that most users never found. One cryptographer who worked on the rollout pointed out that public commitments to privacy are the only leverage users actually have and if those commitments can be reversed by designing a feature to fail and blaming users for not finding it, the privacy promise was never a product decision. It was a branding exercise with a shelf life.

Black Journalists Speak Out Against Alleged Retaliation and Discrimination at WJZ

, Baltimore Beat

Stephon Dingle grew up in Park Heights watching WJZ every morning with his grandmother. He won two Emmys covering Breonna Taylor’s case in Louisville, then took a pay cut to come back to Baltimore and work at the station he grew up on. Within a year of filing a harassment complaint, his assignments dried up, his role shrank, and eventually the station kept paying him while keeping him off the air until his contract expired. He’s one of eight Black journalists who formed what they call the Accountability Coalition, documenting patterns of retaliation and a culture of fear inside the newsroom. CBS laid off four people in Baltimore in October. All of them Black. NABJ has threatened to disinvite CBS from its August convention if the concerns aren’t addressed. I’m a Black journalist. None of this is surprising. That’s the problem.

From the Confederacy to the White House: How Southern Beauty Traditions Went MAGA

Code Switch (NPR)

I wasn’t sure about this one at first — as a Black gay man, I don’t have a lot of interest in platforming the aesthetics of people who would rather I didn’t exist. But the episode isn’t about them. It’s about where the aesthetic comes from. In the antebellum South, white women were crowned queen at jousting tournaments, May Day festivals, and Confederate veterans’ reunions. All rituals designed to make racial hierarchy feel like tradition. Scholar Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd traces a direct line from those ceremonies through Bama Rush, beauty pageants, and into the look that now defines Trump’s inner circle. The aesthetic survived the Confederacy because it was never really about beauty. It was about who gets crowned.

Hungry? Welcome to Ravenous

Ravenous

Five former Eater writers got tired of watching the media industry gut food journalism and replace it with AI-generated lists and influencer content. So they built a worker-owned cooperative. No VC money, no corporate parent, and no generative AI. Many of the founders are former union shop stewards. Their obligations, as they put it, are to themselves, their ethics, and their subscribers. Whether that model survives contact with the economics of digital media is the open question. But refusing to start with the compromises most publications end up making is worth paying attention to.

World Inequality Report 2026

World Inequality Database

The largest global dataset on inequality has a new edition. Women earn 32% of what men earn when unpaid labor is counted. The wealthiest 10% are responsible for 77% of carbon emissions tied to capital ownership. And in Western democracies, the old alignment between class and politics has fractured. Educated voters now lean left while high-income voters lean right, a split the researchers call a “multi-elite” system. The numbers haven’t moved in the direction anyone promised. The report makes clear they weren’t designed to.

LONGITUDE: 6.2603° W

Dublin, Ireland

This is the 3rd entry in LONGITUDE, a series told through place for paid subscribers. Previous entries were Bangkok and Ho Chi Minh City.

Soundtrack: firecrackers from teenagers in the park / the Luas tram grinding through the city / bus engines / rain on everything / water splashing from cars through puddles / live bands bleeding out of pub doors on a Friday night

A narrated edition of this entry, recorded by me, is available below.

I arrived in Dublin in September 2023 from Paris.

I had been weighing Dublin against Paris for a master’s program, and Dublin won for reasons that made sense to me at the time. My last name is Ward, and somewhere along the way I looked up its origins and found Ireland. Something about that felt meaningful, like this place might feel more familiar than I expected.

I was also choosing discomfort on purpose. After years in the humanities with a journalism degree and a master’s in public diplomacy, I was starting over in Human-Computer Interaction with a focus on responsible AI. Dublin offered that. It also offered a longer horizon: five years to citizenship, and with it the option of living and working elsewhere in the EU if I wanted.

So the plan was simple. Get the degree. Switch from a student visa to a work visa. Stay.

I ended up in student apartments on Bonham Street in the Liberties, Dublin 8.

The Liberties is one of Dublin’s oldest neighborhoods, historically working-class and built around brewing, weaving, and distilling. The Guinness Storehouse is a few minutes away, and Thomas Street still runs with market stalls and family shops alongside the Lidls and Tescos that have moved in.

When I was there, the neighborhood was mid-gentrification. Student housing complexes and hotels were rising on blocks where community spaces used to be. Longtime residents, many in social housing, watched it happen from their windows. It was a place where the history was still visible, but you could feel it being replaced.

My building overlooked a small community park on Bridgefoot Street. From my window I could see the River Liffey in the distance. On some afternoons the park was families and children. On others it was teenagers lighting firecrackers and setting small fires for no obvious reason. Some days I would look down and see people openly using drugs or meeting up to buy them in broad daylight, a few feet from the playground.

It did not bother me the way it might have someone else. I grew up in the D.C. area. I spent 13 years in Los Angeles. I know what neighborhoods look like when they are caught between what they were and what someone with money wants them to become. Still, it was strange to see that in Dublin, a city I had been told was charming and friendly and full of pubs.

Being in the city center meant everything was walkable, and that changed me more than I expected.

I grew up in suburban Maryland, where getting a driver’s license felt like a rite of passage. You needed a car to get anywhere. Public transportation existed in Washington, but I barely used it. I would take the Metro if I had to. The bus was another matter. Somewhere along the way, I had absorbed the idea that riding the bus was a sign of poverty. Why would you take the bus if you could afford not to?

I know now that this is an American belief as much as an infrastructural one. I just had never named it as inherited until I left the country. In Los Angeles it got worse, because Los Angeles is a car city by design. I had a car. I drove everywhere. I never rode the bus.

In Dublin, everyone rides the bus.

They have trams, the Luas, running through the city on fixed lines. But the bus is how most people move. So there I was, 41 years old, taking the bus as part of ordinary life for the first time. The adjustment had nothing to do with the bus itself. The bus was fine. What felt strange was realizing I had to unlearn something I had been carrying for years without examining it.

That belief is gone now. I walk or take transit without thinking about it. But if I moved back to Los Angeles, I doubt I would become a regular bus rider overnight. Some inheritances loosen slowly.

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One day, during rush hour, a family got on the bus: a man, a woman, and about five children ranging from a teenager to a baby still being carried. The woman looked barely old enough to be the mother of all of them. One of the boys, maybe 7 or 8, was completely obnoxious in the way only some kids that age can be. He ran up and down the packed bus, upstairs and back down again, bothering everyone.

I was sitting on the lower level in the back, in the middle seat so I could cross my legs. His teenage sister had ended up near me. Eventually he made his way over too, looked me up and down, and announced at full volume:

“Are those GIRL shoes?!”

I was wearing Saint Laurent Wyatt boots. Leopard print. Maybe a one-inch heel. A long black wool coat.

The entire back of the bus turned to look at me.

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‘Given a Gun and Sent to Die’: Kenyans Lured to Fight for Russia in Ukraine

NPR

A man in Kisii County, Kenya, flew to Russia after being promised a job as a driver. He signed a contract in a language he couldn’t read. Weeks later, his family learned he was dead from a television broadcast. More than a thousand Kenyans have been recruited this way — promised skilled work, handed a weapon, given nine days of training and sent to the front lines. Compensation for the dead is available only to Russian citizens. The question of whose bodies are expendable has always had an answer. It just changes depending on who needs soldiers.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

HBO

The trailer dropped last week and it’s everywhere. I’m a millennial, so I grew up with these movies — and I didn’t expect to feel anything watching an 11-year-old I’ve never seen before walk through Platform 9¾. But here we are. The Succession showrunner is running it. The Game of Thrones director is behind the camera. The actors have signed 10-year contracts. The most expensive bet in entertainment right now is a story an entire generation already knows by heart. That says something about what we’re willing to pay to feel like we did when we were kids.

I make good money. Why do I still feel like this?

The American middle class wasn’t a natural outcome of hard work. It was a policy project — built by the GI Bill, union protections, public universities, and a tax code that funded all of it. Then every piece of that bundle was unbundled and repriced. names what’s left: two groups living inside the same squeeze at different price points. One can’t afford the basics. The other can’t afford the life they were trained to expect. Neither is accumulating capital.

OpenAI Is Shutting Down Sora

TechCrunch

Six months ago, Sora was the future of video. Disney committed a billion dollars. Downloads topped three million. This week, OpenAI killed it. The app was burning through an estimated $15 million a day in computing costs and earned $2.1 million in its entire lifetime. The Disney deal dissolved before a single dollar changed hands. Impressive demos are not products. And the inherited Silicon Valley belief that hype and demand are the same thing just lost another argument.

The Zombie Regulator

The New Yorker

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau returned $21 billion to Americans and recovered $5 billion in penalties from banks and tech companies. Now its employees are paid to sit at their desks and do nothing. One examiner copy-pasted the same line into her weekly accomplishments email for months: “I did not violate Director Vought’s stop-work order.” The agency built to protect people from financial ruin is being dismantled by people who were never supposed to run it.

Lay It Down

Hazlitt

John Samson Fellows — the Weakerthans’ frontman, once called the prairie poet voice of his generation — has stopped making music. He was diagnosed with major depressive disorder and hospitalized. Now he weaves on a loom in his Winnipeg basement, makes small fabric pieces, and gives them to people he loves. He converted to Quakerism and rewrites hymns to sing at protests. “Everything dies,” he said. “We’re upset by change and by things dying and passing away, but sometimes they really need to.”

What Happened When I Began to Speak Welsh

The Yale Review

At his grandmother’s funeral, the service was in Welsh. Her first language. His mother’s too. He didn’t understand a word. Years later, he opened Duolingo and started trying to learn the language his family carried for generations — the same language the British government once punished children for speaking in school. He may never be fluent. The essay isn’t about fluency. It’s about what it feels like to reach for something your family was forced to let go of, and find it still there, just barely.

Why Minneapolis Continues to Stand Up Against ICE

ProPublica

A ProPublica journalist photographed the people in his own Minneapolis neighborhood who stepped up after ICE arrived. A 64-year-old cancer survivor patrols with a whistle. A cafe owner organizes rides for her staff. A pastor’s church has fed thousands. One neighbor put it simply: “Legal immigration, illegal immigration? That’s not my call. That’s not my fight. By the time you’re my neighbor, you’re my neighbor.”

I was sitting by the window waiting for my food, half on my phone, half watching the street.

Next door, a white couple came out of the restaurant and climbed onto a motorbike. I happened to look up at the same moment the woman looked over at me. The expression on her face was immediate and unmistakable: a glare sharp enough that it made me laugh out loud.

It wasn’t fear exactly. Not curiosity either. It was something closer to offense. The kind of look people give when they feel their space has been intruded upon.

And I remember thinking, almost instinctively: No — what are you doing here?

Not because I belonged there more than she did. I didn’t. We were both visitors in Bali. That was the point.

I’ve seen versions of that look in Vietnam and Thailand. It’s not the hostility that bothers me. It’s the assumption underneath it. Some white travelers arrive in other people’s countries without leaving their racial hierarchy behind. They move through a place as if they are still the reference point.

There is a special kind of delusion in being a guest and still imagining yourself the default. Travel is supposed to unsettle that instinct.

Leaving your own country should interrupt the belief that the world is organized around you. But that interruption doesn’t always happen. Some people cross borders without giving up their old assumptions about who looks suspicious, who seems out of place, or who gets to move through a space without explanation.

Tourism has a history of making that posture look normal. Scholars have argued that modern tourism didn’t develop apart from imperial power — it developed alongside it. Old ideas of superiority still shape how people move through other people’s countries today.

Indonesia has its own version of that history. Research on colonial tourism in the Dutch East Indies shows that travel was tied to racial hierarchy from the start, with places marketed for European visitors and local people cast as part of the backdrop rather than the center of the story.

Bali’s present-day tourism economy makes that tension sharper. In 2024, the island received 6.33 million international visitors, according to TIME, which reported on the strain overtourism has placed on daily life, infrastructure, and the patience of locals. None of that means every tense glance carries grand historical meaning. But it does mean these encounters do not happen in a vacuum.

What made me laugh was how much could fit inside such a small moment. A look lasting maybe two seconds, and inside it an entire social order. Not just prejudice, but orientation. A way of seeing the world that survives the flight, the passport check, the hotel arrival, the scooter rental. A person can travel thousands of miles and still expect the hierarchy they learned at home to hold.

That may be one of the clearest things travel reveals. Not just where people go, but what they bring with them.

Sometimes it’s curiosity.

Sometimes it’s humility.

And sometimes it’s the conviction that distance changes nothing about who gets to feel central.

Some people travel. Their hierarchy does too. ⁂

Earlier in INHERITANCE

Seven things here. The Blackbird Spyplane piece is one of the best, and exactly why this roundup exists.

Searching for Meaning in My Grandmother’s Wild Life—and Finding Something Else Entirely

Vogue

A writer interviews family and friends to preserve her grandmother before dementia takes too much. What she finds is a woman who drank, left marriages, kept a kiln in her flat, and lived on communes — a life that doesn’t match the gentle figure she grew up knowing. The piece is about what happens when the archive you build reveals someone you weren’t prepared to hold.

A$AP Rocky Is Living His American Dream

Esquire

A celebrity profile that is about return: what success looks like when the neighborhood that made you is still part of the story. The most interesting thing here is not fame, but the question underneath it: what you owe the people who knew you before any of this made sense.

Thinking of a ‘No Buy’ 2026?

The Independent

Under the language of budgeting is an older American belief: that discipline is a form of virtue, and that hardship can be redeemed if it improves your character.

Introducing The SIL, a Vintage Site Where Provenance Comes First

Vogue,

A vintage platform built around provenance sounds niche until you remember how much modern consumption depends on pretending objects come from nowhere. This is about why things feel different when their former lives are allowed to stay attached.

Memory of Winter

Emergence Magazine

Zoë Schlanger writes about plant emergence, climate volatility, and the gamble of coming back to life too early. Underneath it is a larger question: what happens when the old cues stop working, and survival starts depending on whether you can tell the difference?

Open-Source AI Hardware Could Weaken Big Tech’s Grip on AI

Rest of World

A handheld AI device out of India runs offline, supports 22 languages, and is being released as open-source hardware. The older question underneath is who gets to own the infrastructure of intelligence — and whether “open” can survive the same consolidation that swallowed the early internet.

This Life Gives You Nothing

A writer picks up Proust to make an Instagram reel and accidentally remembers what reading is for. The essay underneath the bravado is about what constant mediation does to attention — how screens don’t just distract you, but restructure the way you see, until looking at a real hillside feels indistinguishable from looking at a photo of one. The question it lands on is whether your attention still belongs to you, or whether you surrendered it so gradually you didn’t notice.

Photo Essay

I kept looking down before I knew how to cross.

From the balcony, the street below first made sense as pattern: red chairs on the sidewalk, scooters moving around them, dogs treating traffic like a suggestion, older buildings pressed against newer ones, and the river carrying dredgers and workboats past the edge of the neighborhood.

11:22 p.m., and the sidewalk was still occupied. ETHAN WARD

Read more

Eight things for this week’s What I’ve Taken. One of them goes up in smoke.

Sinners at the Oscars

Variety + ABC

Ryan Coogler’s vampire-blues epic went into the Oscars with a record 16 nominations and left with four wins. The performance makes the case better than the awards count does: Sinners put Black musical inheritance on center stage.

The Victims Who Fought Back

ProPublica / The New York Times Magazine

Oklahoma passed a law to reduce sentences for domestic violence survivors imprisoned for fighting back against their abusers. Prosecutors have made sure it barely works. The legal system inherited its assumptions about who counts as a victim — and those assumptions are surviving even the laws designed to challenge them.

Love in the Time of A.I. Companions

The New Yorker

These tools are arriving in a culture already accustomed to thinner and thinner forms of care. What they normalize is companionship stripped of reciprocity, obligation, and any expectation that care should ask something of us in return.

Computing in the Age of Decolonization

Rest of World

India spent decades pursuing technological sovereignty. What it built instead was a deeper dependence on the firms it set out to escape. Postcolonial ambition became a route to new forms of subordination — not because the ambition was wrong, but because the structures it confronted proved more adaptive than anyone anticipated.

Inside the Criminal World of Southeast Asia’s Scam Compounds

Aeon

Workers trafficked into cybercrime compounds in Cambodia and Myanmar exist in a space where victim and perpetrator collapse into the same person. Nobody — not governments, not NGOs, not the workers themselves — has a clean name for what’s happening.

Instrumentalisation Is Making Everything a Means to an End

Aeon

Friendship improves health outcomes. Nature reduces cortisol. Art boosts creativity. When did we stop valuing anything for its own sake? The essay names a cultural inheritance so pervasive it is easy to miss: the belief that nothing matters unless it produces a measurable return.

Cultural Fluency Is the Strongest Currency for Media in 2026

Nieman Lab

Legacy media institutions abandoned cultural fluency precisely when it became most valuable. Now community-rooted outlets and culturally embedded creators are inheriting the audiences those institutions trained themselves not to see.

Ogoh-Ogoh

Field video, Ubud, Bali

The night before Nyepi, the Balinese day of silence, I watched communities parade enormous demon effigies called ogoh-ogoh through the streets, then stage their destruction in smoke and flares. These took months to build and lasted one evening. The ritual turns fear into something visible, public, and temporary — name what haunts you, build it so everyone can see it, then let it go.

Carol Myers was not accused of stealing. That was part of what unsettled her.

She had finished paying at a self-checkout in a Sainsbury’s in south London when a screen flashed red. An employee approached and told her she would need to be checked. Myers asked why. The employee could not say.

“My face popped up on the screen,” Myers told me. “Then when you pay, the system goes off and you need to get checked.”

The same thing happened weeks later at a Primark and H&M. And then again at a different location in Lewisham. Myers began noticing who was stopped and who was not.

“There were three white people in front of me,” she said. “They went through. The minute I went there, it happened.”

No one explained what she had been flagged for. No one explained how long the information would be kept or where else it might travel. No one had to.

Each time, the explanation was the same and delivered, as Myers described it, like a script. “It’s just a random check. It’s just the AI. It’s just doing it random, just to check.” She asked how it could be random if it kept happening to her, at different locations, on different days. No one had an answer for that either.

I am not British. I don’t live in London. But I am a Black man, and listening to Myers describe what happened to her felt like something I already knew— not because I had experienced the same technology, but because I recognized the structure. Someone in authority makes a decision about you. The decision is delivered without context. You are expected to comply first and understand later, if at all. The technology is new. The experience is not.

Myers is an IT teacher and a law student. She understood faster than most people would that what she was encountering was facial recognition, not a random check. But understanding the technology did not protect her from it. And it did not give her anywhere to direct her frustration.

“Who are you going to be upset at,” she asked. “The machine or the store clerk? They are doing their job.”

Myers compared the experience to stop and search encounters her sons began having when they were 12. In both cases, the reason was never personal. It was always the system.

But stop and search, however flawed, at least operated within a legal framework that required stated grounds. What happened to Myers required nothing. The machine decided and the employee delivered the news.

“It impacts you in a negative way,” she told me. “You’re spending your money and the algorithm is picking you as a Black person.”

She had just completed a transaction — the most ordinary, cooperative thing a person can do inside a store — and the system flagged her anyway. The receipt did not matter.

What Myers described mirrors facial-recognition systems now used across parts of the UK retail sector, including those operated by Facewatch, which runs in hundreds of stores. Myers had never heard of Facewatch before I mentioned it to her during our conversation. She did not consent to being scanned. She said she never saw a sign in any of the stores explaining that the technology was in use.

Retailers in the UK don’t need customer consent to use facial recognition. Campaigners argue that a small sign near an entrance tells shoppers very little about when they are being scanned, how long the data is kept, or where it goes next. These systems run on private contracts, not public law, but they rely on the same face-scanning logic used by police forces.

Metropolitan Police facial recognition systems in London wrongly flagged people as suspects in 80% of alerts in 2025. Eight out of 10 of those false alerts were Black people. Police scanned more than 3 million people across London in the past year alone.

Warren Rajah, a Black Londoner, was ejected from an Elephant & Castle Sainsbury’s in January 2026 after staff said the system flagged him as a shoplifter. He was not in the database. A spokesperson for Sainsbury’s told me the system had not made a mistake; an employee had stopped the wrong person. But Rajah had already been marked in front of other shoppers.

There is a distinction that seems small but changes everything: the difference between a wrong decision and an unexplained one. A wrong decision can, at least in theory, be corrected. An unexplained decision teaches you that correction was never part of the design.

Dr. Nessa Keddo, a senior lecturer at King’s College London who studies automation and creative labor, put it this way: “Algorithms decide what we see, who gets opportunities, how we’re categorized and judged.”

Keddo’s own path into this work started in advertising, where she spent more than a decade working on campaigns for brands like Disney and Adidas. She began noticing the problem from the back end of Meta’s business tools — who was included in audience measurement, who was excluded, and what happened when targeting became personal. Her clients were asking versions of the same questions her research would later formalize: what are we measuring, who is being left out, and what follows from that absence?

In creative industries, Keddo has watched algorithmic systems reshape labor without ever announcing the change. She told me entry-level workers, especially recent graduates, are often hit first. Roles that once required teams to brainstorm and build campaigns are compressed by automation. The jobs do not always disappear cleanly. They narrow. They thin out. Engagement drops. Opportunities dry up. People feel the consequences without being told what changed or whether it will change back. There is no one to appeal to and nothing clear to contest.

That dynamic becomes sharpest in policing, and it predates the current generation of AI tools.

Sara Chitseko, pre-crime program manager at Open Rights Group, was 16 when the Metropolitan Police began building the Gangs Matrix in 2012. She remembers it clearly because she had friends who were criminalized under it. The database emerged in the aftermath of the 2011 London riots, when Prime Minister David Cameron announced a “war on gangs” — language Chitseko describes as a dog whistle for Black youth.

At its peak in October 2017, the Matrix held 3,806 people. Seventy-eight percent were Black, even though Black Londoners made up only 27% of those convicted of serious youth violence. The vast majority of those listed were young Black men and boys. Being on the Matrix could get you denied housing, rejected from college and stripped of benefits. Young people often did not find out they were listed until a school, housing provider, or another institution told them they had been flagged. The police were not saying, You are on the Gangs Matrix. The consequences arrived first. The person affected had to work backward to figure out why.

Years later, after sustained pressure from communities and legal advocates, the Metropolitan Police admitted the database was unlawful and dismantled it. Chitseko said she was in her bedroom at her parents’ house when the news broke. Her phone lit up with messages. “Different people being like, have you seen it? It’s in the news,” she told me. “I think we’ve got there.”

But the victory came with a caveat. By the time the Matrix was dismantled, the data it contained had already been shared — with immigration, with housing providers, with other police systems. Trying to trace where it had all gone was, as Chitseko described it, “a web.” And when the Met announced it was replacing the Matrix with something called the Violence Harm Assessment, Chitseko recognized the logic immediately. Same structure. Different name.

“These systems don’t predict crime,” she said. “All they really predict is policing, because they’re based on past policing data.”

Historic police data, shaped by unequal enforcement, gets fed into models that reproduce those patterns while presenting the output as objective.

“If it’s discriminatory and unjust,” Chitseko said, “that’s just injustice delivered faster and at scale.”

Chitseko also cautioned against investing more money into making facial recognition more accurate. She said even if these systems were perfectly accurate, she still wouldn’t want to live in a world where her face was being scanned every day.

That matters because we keep talking about AI bias as though the deepest problem is accuracy, as though better training data or more representative datasets would solve what is happening here. But even a perfectly accurate system that never explains itself is still a system that has taken away your say in what happens to you. Accuracy does not restore what explanation would have provided.

The dismantling of the Gangs Matrix did not erase the data that had already been collected or undo every consequence of its use. But it interrupted a system that relied on silence. That interruption matters because it proved something these systems work hard to make us forget: their authority depends on consent, compliance, and the hope that no one asks too many questions.

I started reporting on technology to understand why it was not helping the people who needed it most. What I found, across two countries and several years, is that the tools already exist. They are everywhere. The question is who they are pointed at, and whether the people in their sights will ever be told why.

Myers told me she still shops in the same neighborhoods. She still pays attention to who is stopped and who is not.

“It’s devastating,” she said. “Everyone looks at you. It feels like you’ve done something wrong when you haven’t.”

Artificial intelligence did not create this vulnerability. It made it easier to enforce without explanation. But explanation is how power becomes visible. When it disappears, everything else becomes easier to take. ⁂

This essay builds on reporting for Coded Out, a three-part AI policy podcast I produced and hosted for The Black Policy Institute in London. The podcast featured interviews with Carol Myers, Dr. Nessa Keddo, and Sara Chitseko.

Earlier in INHERITANCE

Seven this week. I’d start with the one about Bisbee.

When AI Picks the Targets

The Washington Post

The story is not just that AI is now helping wage war in real time. It is that institutions built to diffuse responsibility have found a tool that can do it faster. When target selection starts to move at machine speed, the inheritance is not only technological power, but a familiar temptation to treat judgment as something that can be outsourced.

Can AI Save Local News?

The Wall Street Journal

The headline promises a story about technology. What it actually delivers is the inherited business model of American journalism — and how decades of institutional decay hollowed out the very thing local papers were built to do.

Is Inherited Wealth Bad?

Aeon

An economist makes a counterintuitive case: rising inheritances are a sign of a healthy economy, not a sick one. The numbers are interesting — a modest bequest can compress inequality among heirs because $100,000 is life-changing for someone with $50,000 and irrelevant to someone with $10 million. The essay never asks what happens to the people who inherit nothing at all.

Vigilantes at Dawn

Longreads

In 1917, armed men wearing white armbands rounded up nearly 1,200 striking miners in Bisbee, Arizona, forced them into cattle cars, and drove them into the desert. A century later, a journalist traces her great-grandfather’s escape over the mountains and asks the question that makes this more than a history piece: as deportation lists circulate again, what do the descendants of immigrants owe the dead — and the living?

35 and 1

Longreads

A woman’s son is born on the exact birthday of the brother she lost to an overdose a decade earlier. Out of 365 days, this one. What follows is an essay about grief, motherhood, and how absence keeps finding new places to live.

An Action-Figure Maker’s Outsized Tribute to His Late Brother

Aeon (short film, 15 mins)

A Scottish artist who builds handcrafted figurines of cultural icons turns, for the first time, to the person who taught him the craft: his brother, who died. The film is quiet and precise — hands working, memories surfacing — and it circles a question the artist never quite answers: whether he is building a tribute or trying to keep someone from disappearing entirely.

Poisonous Objects

The New York Review of Books

Carolina A. Miranda reviews two Los Angeles exhibitions examining what Confederate monuments do — not commemorate history, but enforce it. At MOCA, Kara Walker took a bronze equestrian statue of Stonewall Jackson, cut it apart with a plasma cutter, and reassembled it into something monstrous. The piece asks a question the original sculptor never intended: if the monument was built to make white supremacy look noble, what does it look like when you strip the aesthetics away?

I spent two days trapped in an apartment in Cebu City that smelled faintly of rotting fruit and someone else’s bad decisions.

Ants moved across the floor in a clean line toward a takeout container the previous guest had left on the balcony. The balcony chair was broken. I learned that by nearly falling off it. The bathroom had no shower curtain, so every time I turned the water on, the floor flooded. In the lobby, signs asked residents to stop throwing trash and cigarettes off their balconies because other residents were complaining.

This was not the apartment I had paid for.

Or rather: it was exactly the apartment I had paid for, because the apartment I had paid for did not exist. What existed were photographs. A lobby shot taken at the perfect angle, lit like a hotel commercial. Wide, clean, and full of promise. What existed were reassuring messages from the hosts, who answered my questions so politely before booking that I thought I was making a smart decision. What existed was Airbnb’s larger promise that you could belong anywhere, that travel had been democratized, that the world was now yours to access on your terms.

What I got was a lie held together by a cancellation policy designed to trap me the moment I discovered the truth.

I had used Airbnb across Southeast Asia for months in Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi, Da Nang, Hoi An, and Bali. Every booking had delivered what the photos promised, sometimes better. I knew what to look for. I knew what to ask. I knew what kinds of listings to avoid.

That trust is what made Cebu so disorienting. I did my due diligence. I still got scammed.

The lie is that ownership of property, access, and other people’s need for shelter is a path to freedom. That if you can position yourself between someone else’s labor and someone else’s need, you can extract value without producing anything. That this is not only acceptable but admirable. That this is wealth.

The hosts who owned my apartment in Cebu—Steve and Jane—were based in the same city. They were a few miles away. When I reported the problems, they offered to move me to a different unit and said they needed an hour to prepare it.

It wasn’t prepared.

The second unit had its own problems: more insects, more grime, a bathroom that looked like it had not been cleaned in weeks. When I asked them to honor the original two-week booking and refund the rest, they refused. They said they were following Airbnb policy.

And they were.

What made it worse was that they were not even doing the work themselves. They kept saying they could send the cleaner or the maintenance guy. Which meant the cleaner they hired had not removed the rotting food, scrubbed the grime, or checked for ants. Steve and Jane extracted rent without being present. Their cleaner got paid without actually cleaning.

Here’s how the trap works.

When you book a long-term stay on Airbnb — anything over 28 days — the cancellation policy is built to lock you in before you can discover what is wrong. For my booking, Airbnb’s standard Firm Long-Term policy meant that if I canceled thirty or more days before check-in, I would get a full refund. If I canceled with less than thirty days’ notice, the first month became nonrefundable. Once I checked in, I would need to give thirty days’ notice to shorten the stay. In practice, that meant I would still be paying for another month even if I wanted to leave immediately.

By the time I arrived and found the ants, the broken furniture, the grime, and the general decay, it was already too late. I was locked into paying for weeks of accommodation I would never have accepted had I known the truth.

The policy ensures that by the time you open the door and see reality, the money is already theirs. It is not a neutral framework. It is a mechanism that makes misrepresentation survivable for the host.

Steve and Jane matter here less as individuals than as examples of what Airbnb trains people to become.

They are not cartoon villains. They are true believers. They have absorbed what Airbnb has spent years teaching people to accept as normal: that property ownership is a passive income stream, that you can make money while you sleep, that you do not need to be present, attentive, or even especially competent as long as you control access to an asset someone else needs. They do not think they are running a scam. They think they are running a business.

But the work still has to get done somewhere. And when the hosts outsource it, the burden shifts again — to customer support, to contractors, and finally to the guest.

Except Airbnb’s customer support does not really do that work either.

I was passed among at least 18 different agents. None of them appeared to have read the previous messages. All of them repeated some version of the same script: they understood my frustration, but the cancellation policy was clear.

I kept sending documentation. Photos of the ants. Videos of the building. Screenshots of the hosts’ own messages acknowledging the problems. Each time, a new agent. Each time, the same answer.

Then I received this: “The documentation you have provided is unfortunately not sufficient for us to offer a full refund for this reservation.”

That was the point when the actual shape of the system became obvious.

The work goes to you. The guest. You become your own lawyer, documentarian, researcher, and advocate. You gather evidence, build a record, and keep escalating into a structure designed to wear you down. You become the person responsible for forcing accountability out of a platform that has made accountability everyone else’s problem.

That is the real cost of passive income. Not simply that no one does the work. It is that when the system fails, the only person left holding the bag is the one who never extracted a dime from it.

Airbnb’s origin story is now familiar. Two broke men in San Francisco rented out air mattresses during a design conference in 2007 and built a company on the idea that strangers could trust each other enough to share space.

That story is still on the website. It is still in the marketing. It is still what many of us believe, at least partly, when we book.

But the company that story describes does not exist anymore, if it ever did.

What exists now is a global platform with the reach of a hotel chain and the accountability of nobody. It is not treated as a landlord, so it has no obligation to maintain conditions. It is not treated as a hotelier, so it avoids many of the regulations that govern hospitality. It sits between categories and answers fully to neither. The hosts are independent. The platform is neutral. And when something goes wrong, the guest discovers that no one in the arrangement is actually responsible for anything.

And still, people keep using it. I keep using it. Not because it is trustworthy, but because for longer stays in parts of Southeast Asia, the alternatives are often either more expensive or less flexible. Airbnb built a market around that gap and made itself feel inevitable.

The promise was that you could have the intimacy of someone’s home without the impersonality of a hotel. What you often get instead is a cancellation policy that protects one side and a review system that asks you to trust a consensus that may not mean much at all.

I contacted Airbnb’s press office with three questions: how the company prevents cancellation policies from being used to protect fraudulent listings, what recourse guests have when listings are materially misrepresented after the refund window has closed, and whether it would intervene in my case given the documented evidence. I followed up with a question about the review process. As of publication, Airbnb had not responded.

I also filed complaints with the Philippine Department of Trade and Industry for fraudulent business practices and with the Department of Tourism for accommodation standards violations. I sent a demand letter through Airbnb’s own support system outlining what I believed were clear consumer-protection and breach-of-contract issues.

Eventually, Airbnb relented and gave me a full refund.

I won, but only because I had unusual advantages. I am a journalist. I know how to document. I know how to escalate. I know how to find the right email addresses and how to keep pressing when a system assumes most people will stop.

Most people probably do stop. Or cannot afford not to.

That matters more than my refund does.

Because even after the refund, the structure remained intact. The listing stayed up. The burden remained where it had always been: on the guest who notices the lie and then has to prove, repeatedly, that it is a lie.

Airbnb did not invent extraction. It inherited it from a much older tradition of landlordism that treats housing as an investment vehicle instead of a human need, and treats maintenance and care as costs to be minimized rather than obligations to be met.

And we accepted it. Not because it worked especially well, but because it felt inevitable. Because we inherited a faith that markets correct themselves, that reviews equal accountability and that access equals fairness. We rarely stop to ask who taught us that, or who benefits from our continuing to believe it.

The reviews that helped me decide became harder to trust once I understood what five stars actually measure. It doesn’t distinguish between a weekend guest who used the apartment as a place to sleep between bars and a two-week guest who opened every cabinet and found what was living inside. It doesn’t distinguish between a smooth check-in and working plumbing. It doesn’t account for the guest who noticed problems but didn’t want the confrontation of saying so. Forty-four people did not necessarily have the same stay. They answered from different thresholds, different lengths of stay, and different levels of scrutiny, and the platform compressed all of that into one reassuring number.

And now we’re all standing in the apartment we paid for: the one with the ants, the broken furniture, and the lobby signs begging people to stop throwing trash off their balconies. ⁂

Earlier in INHERITANCE

When most people hear the word inheritance, they think of money. Property. Maybe a last name.

But the most powerful things we inherit are invisible. Ideas about success. Definitions of safety. Assumptions about who belongs where, who deserves what, and what’s worth sacrificing for.

INHERITANCE traces them back to where they started — and shows you what they cost.

Here are five essays that show how.

The American Experiment

Winner of a 2026 Communicator Award of Distinction. Why does America call itself an experiment — and who consented to be tested? The question started in a Maryland classroom. The answer took six years to write.

Colonial Echoes at the Checkout Counter

What everyday transactions reveal about race, power, and who gets forgiven. It starts at a counter in Vietnam, with a price that doesn’t make sense — and a feeling that does.

The Algorithm Doesn’t Owe You an Explanation

How AI systems are normalizing decisions no one has to justify. A Black woman is flagged at self-checkout in London. A man is ejected from a store for a match that wasn’t his. The technology is new. The experience is not.

Why OnlyFans Makes Sense

On broken promises, stagnant wages, and the market value of my feet. The financial contract you were raised to trust — school, degree, career, security — stopped delivering a long time ago. This essay is about what comes after.

The Slow Burn of Becoming

What nine years of survival taught me about ambition, legitimacy, and leaving. In 2016, I was 34 years old, broke, depressed, and living in Los Angeles. This is the essay about what happened next.

Every essay starts with the same question: What did you inherit, and what are you going to do about it? Welcome.

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