Yesterday, my mom was going through a bunch of old papers and finding out what things she needed to shred and get rid of. There were documents from all parts of our lives, from Duncan (my lab who passed away almost three years ago) and his many medical procedures to old school worksheets. While I was working on something else, my mom gave me a long envelope with a packet that she told me she wanted to read. In that packet? A psychological evaluation from when I was eleven years old in 6th grade. And in that packet, I had…
This summer has been one of the best I’ve ever enjoyed for music in a long time.
In this weird limbo of places being open but also closed, with delta out here going on a rampage, we all are all now getting the chance to hear music outside again. I’ve been bouncing from Mereba to Remble, from IDK to Still Woozy, sort of with no pattern or real desire to fit one mood. I’ll be listening to Vince Staples on the BART, blasting ALLBLACK in the car, and study to Cautious Clay. It’s an incoherent medley of music to fit the varying developments going on in my life.
Much of my constant juggling of different genres and…
They put a pay-only carpool lane on the highway in the East Bay (880). Well… to be more precise, they’re adding a FasTrak lane to pretty much every major highway in the Bay from here on out.
The cost to ride the BART now is almost $5.00 just to get on and increases when you travel across multiple stop zones. BART also has stopped service after 9 PM, as if that helps to make things any easier when each train is 15–20 minutes apart. I don’t even want to check how much more it costs to ride CalTrain.
San Francisco…
I’m doing well.
I don’t get a chance to verbalize that often whenever this becomes the case in my life, but that’s how simply I could describe what this past week has been.
Being back in the Bay Area continues to bring back constant feelings of deja vu. I’m getting more detached from the world I grew up in. The neoliberal woketivism environment here did nothing but repeatedly make me feel alienated. You know, the flavor of racism where they love to please you to your face, say they voted for Obama, while also simultaneously being five seconds away from calling the cops…
I’ve been thinking a lot about what summertime means.
Maybe it’s the famous Mariame Kaba essay entitled “Summer Heat” that spurred the ongoing reflections that I have whenever this part of the year arrives, but I feel every year as though I don’t know what I am supposed to make of this time. Sure, college students may be working summer jobs, doing research possibly, taking an internship, or just resting. Sometimes it is an amalgamation of these activities. But even then, I ask myself, what is this time of year supposed to be?
I’m thinking about climate catastrophes that are…
I’ve written about Tyler, The Creator on the blog almost immediately since its inception four-ish years ago.
It’s a little difficult to describe the origins of my affection for Tyler’s work, probably because growing up as a kid in California, Odd Future was omnipresent. Before I even began to enjoy Goblin or Cherry Bomb, I knew the OF donut logo. I knew about the collective, the memes, the jokes, the cyphers, and everything about this group of Black nerds from LA. …
It’s difficult to write an original critique or something completely new about Juneteenth. In every possible angle and perspective, radical Black people have been explaining how the signing of this national holiday continues the state’s efforts to liberalize everything about Black existence in the US. With that perspective, Josh Briond’s latest piece in Hampton Think pretty much sums up my thoughts about the holiday.
But that isn’t really what I want to write about, or think much more about. I am thinking more precisely about what these constant acts of cooptation mean to suppress and inhibit any Black radical movement…
*Content warning: mention of suicide
Sometimes it’s often hard to describe the extent to which a single character or story captivates us as an audience. You can see what the outcome will be, or even recognize that the narrative being told comes off as fairly straightforward. But that doesn’t matter in the long run because you’re enjoying the ride and are mesmerized by someone’s charisma that them alone will foster your interest in continuing to watch along.
Few shows or even media recently have gotten me more excited to continue watching along than Lupin, the recent French Netflix original starring…
I don’t think my brain was scrambled this year, but I definitely feel like it was cooked over easy (okay that was lame but that’s fine).
It’s frankly a little jarring to know and think about the fact that I’m halfway done with being an undergrad student. There’s something to be said for having made it through half of what culturally keeps being mentioned as the “best years of your life” when you both a) find that kind of absurd, but also b) recognize that over 1/4th of those years was spent on Zoom. …
I’ve spent the better part of this past week trying to think about how I could frame what the last year has meant for my political education and praxis. I’ve thought about the readings I’ve done, the comrades I’ve met and actions I’ve worked on, and the constant discussions taking place in my apartment or virtually. But what remains a through-line, what has ultimately become central to my approach is this: my care and love of Africans, for Black people, is what will forever guide my work in life.
For a lot of my adolescence, as I began to become…
Noah Tesfaye
Just someone trying to share my story and find who I am, one post at a time
