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One Battle After Another is one of the great films of the year. It’s an epic, tense, madcap journey through several people’s lives. It’s a movie about chasing. The government is chasing some old revolutionaries. The revolutionaries are chasing justice and freedom. A father is secretly chasing his unwanted daughter. A mother’s reputation as a snitch is q…

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I never thought that my videos about Coco Gauff would be the most controversial thing I posted this week. There was an all-out brawl in the comments where people called me anti-Black and anti-woman and questioned if I even understand tennis. The internet is a wild place.

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Jaguar Wright is Black America’s Alex Jones. They’re both into mainstreaming the wild ideas you find in the dank dark corners of the internet. They’re both conspiracy theorists. They’re both discredited. They’re both broke. Jaguar is the chick at the end of the bar who barks out all kinds of crazy things about your favorite celebrities, things that no one would believe except she was once a recording artist so people say, maybe she’s right. She’s been wrong so many times that it’s amazing that people still listen to her. She actually said, “Those tapes of the Obamas at the Freak Offs is real.” Look:

This is obviously immediately disqualifying. Like, if you’re open to saying that in public then we cannot believe anything else you say. But I think I understand why she keeps going and why some people still listen to her. I did a deep dive into the world of Jaguar, including off the record conversations with people who’ve known for her a long time where I learned what really drives her. I think I understand what makes Jaguar who she is.

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I really wanted to like Spike Lee’s new movie From Highest 2 Lowest. It’s got Denzel. It’s got A$AP Rocky. It’s got Jeffrey Wright. It’s shot and set in my neighborhood—downtown Brooklyn. A lot of the shots are images my neighbors and I see every day. We love Spike for that, for lionizing Brooklyn—and especially Fort Greene—in so many of his films. But From Highest 2 Lowest is a deeply flawed piece.

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Crime is political. This week the President and his loyalists have used the false talking point that Washington D.C. is “crime-ridden” (it is not) and one of the most violent cities in the world (wrong again). Out of nowhere we suddenly hear all about “roving gangs of youth.” They don’t say Black youth because they don’t need to. It’s a dogwhistle. The President is fear mongering about DC crime as a way to justify a military takeover of the district. But crime is something lots of politicians use to galvanize white votes.

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The problem was not Samantha. After three years of watching the constantly cringey train wreck that was And Just Like That, I am certain that the problem was not the subtraction of that incredible, iconic character. She was an extremely important part of the particular spirit of Sex and the City. This was a show that was sex positive before that was a term. They needed someone who would be proudly sexual but still respectable—the sort of woman we had never seen on TV before then. Kim Cattrall was brilliant and it was creative tragedy for the franchise to lose her. But And Just Like that had deep structural problems that no single character could have saved. I’ve narrowed it down to three major issues but the show is a hot mess inside of a dumpster fire so I’m sure you could come up with your own three big problems. Here’s mine:

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I got triggered by this Tiktok where a man said, “I know I’m going to get eaten alive for saying this but Beyonce is bigger than Michael Jackson.” He said it with a tone of I’m the only one who has the courage to say the truth. In some circles that tone conveys a sense of legitimacy. This is not one of those circles.

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Jail time is horrible even when you’re in a protected unit like Diddy, so, of course Diddy’s attorney are fighting to get him out of jail. On Thursday the prosecution will respond to Diddy’s team’s requested bail package.

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I don’t want to hear one word about what he could have done better. William McNeil, Jr. was a 22 year-old young man who was alone and scared for his life while surrounded by multiple officers with guns in Jacksonville, Florida. I don’t want to hear about how you would have just complied or about how he should have just done what they said. I’m really disappointed in the Black people saying he should have just complied. We know better. We know just complying is not a guarantee that you won’t get beat down. Yet people are focusing on the citizen’s behavior and talking about what he should have done as if he was in the woods and he encountered a bear and you know bears, they’re wild animals, we can’t control what they do so we gotta do whatever we can to mollify the bear. He didn’t run into wild animals. He ran into humans. You know what I want to hear?

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Malcolm Jamal-Warner’s sudden passing has shaken me to my core. He was a lovely guy who worked hard and cared deeply about his family. He wasn’t sick. He was only 54 and he was on vacation with his family in Costa Rica when a freak accident took him away. He drowned in the ocean, a tragedy that could’ve happened to anyone, a shocking and sad end to a li…

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