Having read this article and the Deadline interview and the comments, it’s interesting to see how different people (including the Jez author) have interpreted her remark about not having “picked” career over marriage.

Poor Baby* Blue! She’s so precious!

True enough.

The only acquaintance I have with his music is an XXL Freshman Class 2017 cypher and, although it pained me to admit it, he was far and away the best rapper in that cypher.

Twas is the new it was.

Without knowing about this rumoured secret kid, I would have thought that Adidon was short for “Adidas Don”, with Don having the meaning it has in Jamaican dancehall culture (and I guess Italian Mafia culture, since I think that’s where the term derived from) of Boss, Big Man, Top Shotta, etc. I mean, we know how…

Thank you! This was very helpful, especially knowing that other people’s cacti are wobbly too. I have been aggressively neglecting my cacti and succulents for the past couple of weeks, in the hope that they will thrive this way.

I am trying my hand with cacti and succulents for the first time. It’s going middling to poorly so far, but I will persist. The ones I got from the nursery have such tiny little roots that even months after repotting them they don’t look like they are firmly anchored in the soil, which worries me. I also got a few…

I missed that one!

I think there are a lot of places in what you wrote that seem to conflate “free thought” and “free speech”. And I don’t get the sense that Janelle Monáe is criticizing free thinking. She’s saying that some free thinking is shitty thinking, and when she encounters that she’s going to call it out. Calling it “free…

“Uh, B-O-B, Bob.” I straight-up cackled at that.

I read the book literally last week, and this exchange with you made me think about how Sam’s ethnicity is portrayed in the book. It isn’t a plot point as such, but it is specifically referred to a few times, and I’m thinking now that it was done to very mildly point out that white people actually have ethnicities…

Nope, he’s white, and the book specifically mentions his German ancestry.

Maybe it is, strictly speaking (although there is the case of Viola Burnham, but I’m not sure she was an elected official). But there have definitely been black women at equivalent or higher levels of political authority in other countries in the Americas (specifically in the Caribbean) in the past. I’m from Barbados…

In the Americas, Trinidad and Tobago currently has a black woman as actual Head of State. I know that Saint Lucia and Barbados (twice!) have also had black women as effective head of state (the Queen is the ‘official’ HoS). Jamaica and Dominica (not the Dominican Republic) have had black women as Head of Government.

A good interview with Erykah Badu is one that takes the reader through a whole gamut of emotions and responses, from amusement to inspiration to frustration to something approaching infuration to disappointment to admiration to head-nodding to eye-rolling. This was a good interview with Erykah Badu.

The young woman in that video is so monochrome that she looks almost unreal. Like uncanny valley unreal, except she is a real human being.

A few years ago, I came across a cute comic-strip introduction to Hangul, and it really is fairly easy to get a handle on. The Korean pride in the simplicity and logical elegance of their script is justified, I think.

It true, though. I read that sentence and was like, Pffft, what is Lauren talking about? She barely looks 27!

My 24-hour skincare routine used to consist of 3 products: African black soap, a semi-random oil mix I concocted myself and used as both cleanser and moisturizer, and a vitamin C serum.