I might have gotten a little too interested in the stock market since this whole Gamestop thing started in late January. I guess I dig deeper into something I know nothing about only when it hits the Twitter trends. (I’m basic like that.) Anyway.

A while after the stock market became part of pop culture, I set up a trading account, put some money dollars on it, and promptly lost some of those money dollars. Yikes. I’d like to say I was pretty chill about the whole thing because I always knew that my capital would be at risk, but…

I’m also a fledgling academic, by the way (sorry)

Reading Virginia Woolf’s essay “On Being Ill” in COVID times is a split-screen exercise. On one side, roughly a century ago, a few years after the Spanish flu pandemic, there is very little literature on the subject of illness; but on the other side, today amid the Covid-19 pandemic, illness is all we talk, read and write about. Her essay becomes a transitional point between then and now, as we realize that her work spearheaded the popularization of illness narratives in both fiction and nonfiction.

In her 1926 essay, Woolf laments the dearth of literature that tackles illness: “English, which…

In Sisterhood and Squatting in the 1970s, Christine Hall gives a dystopian yet accurate description of some boroughs in London. “To walk through Islington, Camden, and Hackney in the early 1970s was to walk along street after street of soot-blackened, late Georgian and Victorian terraces and villas boarded up and left semi-derelict.” Our collective consciousness isn’t trained to think that such a description could be attached to any area in London, so, how’d that happen?

After World War II, Britain had to map out how entire cities would be rebuilt because German bombing had inflicted significant damage to urban areas…

I learned the word ‘empathy’ in the third grade when my White teacher told us, “Do not waste food! Think about the poor little kids in Africa who don’t have any.” All of my classmates, who were all white, thought I was from there. I guess I fit the profile. It’s weird to think that when I was eight years old, my classmates were taught to pity kids from a far-away land whose only characteristic was poverty. Consequently, they must have pitied me, too.

Back at home, my brothers and I needed to eat everything on our plate before leaving…

In the early years of the Women’s Liberation Movement, Black lives didn’t exist. When they did, they were only used as props and disposable objects to further the ideologies of “universal” (read: white) feminism. Hazel V. Carby, scholar and pioneer of Black feminism, reflects this idea in an article appropriately entitled “White Woman Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood”, in which she calls for white feminists to consider race in their theorizing of women’s oppression in a patriarchal society. …

“Why is the African collection on the lowest floor?” I ask a security guard at the British Museum. Every other collection gets sunlight, but Africa is buried underground, hidden beneath the fire exits, accessible only if you want to look for it. The guard tells me it’s probably because the museum acquired this collection last, so instead of building a fourth floor, they dug deeper.

When I visit the National Museum of Scotland I wait for my group of friends to wander off so I can take a picture of the Art of African Metalwork exhibition. As the picture snaps…

February is a stressful month when you’re a Black writer. You want to honor Black History, but you don’t want to cannibalize yourself because people are suddenly interested in your…