What I've Taken — No. 5

Brandy's memoir challenges decades of inherited narrative. Plus Meta's encryption reversal, Black journalists in Baltimore, and what Southern beauty rituals carry forward.

Brandy Norwood’s memoir Phases

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

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

Vasant Laplam 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

Jaisal Noor, 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.