There’s so much great content on the interwebs that it can sometimes feel overwhelming. So here for your reading pleasure are some links worth clicking on. Get those tabs ready!
My Writing
Reading recommendations: What Comic Books Should Be Adapted Next?
Book review: Rise Up! Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone
Book review: The Future Is Past: Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach by Kelly Robson
Book review: “My Mother Is a Bird”: The Astonishing Color of After by Emily X. R. Pan
Comics review: Pull List: Abbott and Destroyer Take On Black Lives Matter
Other Works
“The Forgotten Story of the First Black Female Wrestlers” by Corey Erdman for Vice Sports: “There are any number of other female wrestlers who would have been more appropriate to name the battle royal after, but none are more overdue for praise than four women who changed the pro-wrestling and sporting landscape forever: Ethel Johnson, Babs Wingo, Kathleen Wimbley, and Marva Scott, the first black women’s professional wrestlers.”
“The Island that Disappeared” by Tom Feiling for Longreads: “Providence is a fragment chipped off an empire that no longer exists. Even if the chip were restored to the block from which it fell, it would no longer match, for its contours have been worn smooth by the passage of time. But perhaps ‘fragment’ is a misnomer. Empires are not as clearly delineated as the solid blocks of color on the old maps suggest. Alive, they are dynamic, porous, and hybrid creations, but even once dead, the colors continue to bleed. The British might have forgotten about Providence, but for the islanders, England remained as real, and as unattainable, as an absent father.”
“A Kingdom from Dust” by Mark Arax for California Sunday Magazine: “Seventy-five years ago, writer Carey McWilliams, in Factories in the Field, lambasted the “ribboned Dukes” and “belted Barons” of California agriculture. If he were on the scene today, he’d have to add “sashed Queens” to the list. Measuring the reach of the Resnicks, it’s tempting to lean on the hyperventilated language of the 1930s: Empire. Kingdom. Fiefdom. Feudal. Today, most everything in this desolate reach of Kern County, save for the oil wells, belongs to Paramount Farming, which belongs to the Resnicks. But Paramount isn’t Paramount anymore. By the decree of Lynda, who once contemplated a bowl of those juicy little seedless mandarins and on the spot named them Cuties, this is now the land of Wonderful.”
“The Librarian at the Nexus of the Harlem Renaissance” by Cara Giaimo for Atlas Obscura: “Nearly a century after it began, the Harlem Renaissance remains one of the preeminent cultural movements in American history. And although [Regina] Anderson doesn’t show up in many contemporary accounts of the period, she was there the whole time: lending out books, throwing parties, fighting for opportunities of her own, and enabling the spread of ideas that made the era what it was.”
“Linda Brown Thompson, girl at center of Brown v. Board of Education case, dies” by Harrison Smith and Ellie Silverman for Washington Post: “All Linda Brown wanted was to go to the Sumner School. But she was black, and the Topeka, Kan., elementary school four blocks from her home was segregated, open only to white students.”
Punk-Ass Book Jockey 