South Side Weekly has extensive local coverage of the police shooting of thirteen-year-old Adam Toledo, including two op-eds, “Blaming the Victim” and “We are Adam Toledo”; and a timeline of the Chicago Police Department’s killing of children. The paper also has an article about who gets to define a mass shooting.
At the London Review of Books, Andrea Brady writes about How to Carry Water, a new selection of poems by Lucille Clifton. The first poem in the book is an elegy for Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes. “Clifton is often compared to him,” Brady writes, but “while she shares his concern with the lives of ordinary Black people, she doesn’t ventriloquise her contemporaries in the same way. Instead, she listens to the voices of the dead through automatic writing and Ouija board readings. . . . When she conjures her ancestors, what she often hears are angry ghosts.”
Jamil Smith, most recently a senior writer at Rolling Stone, is joining Vox as senior correspondent.
Jonathan Mattingly, one of the Louisville cops involved in the killing of Breonna Taylor, is writing a book for Tennessee-based conservative publisher Post Hill Press. Following public backlash yesterday, a Simon & Schuster spokesperson announced that the publisher will not be distributing the book for their client Post Hill Press.
For the New Yorker, Hanif Abdurraqib, author most recently of A Little Devil in America, writes about Dawoud Bey’s “Street Portraits.” For Abdurraqib, Bey’s snapshots conjure the small pleasure of recognition: “I think of Bey’s work as a nod to the nod—a gesture of grace and familiarity, made from a respectful distance.” On Monday April 19, Abdurraqib will give a virtual reading hosted by Kelly Writers House.
Applications for the Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant of $40,000 are open now through April 26.
Reuters is redesigning its website and putting it behind a paywall, the New York Times’s Katie Robertson reports. Subscriptions will run $34.99 per month, comparable to Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal’s digital cost.
At n+1, Blair McClendon offers an appreciation of DMX, the late rapper who “made hardcore mainstream.” In the days since he died, clips of DMX “doing something fun like singing pop tunes or ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’” have made the rounds on social media. There’s solace to be found in watching them, McClendon writes, but “it also feels like evidence is being proffered that he wasn’t the frightening man his lyrics indicate. If the simplification were true his music would have been less compelling. He wasn’t just one of these kinds of people; he was all of them.”