All the best writing of the week, all in one place.
Run the Jewels' Killer Mike and El-P Photo: Run the Jewels' Killer Mike and El-P
“I am going to die” - Steve Braunias, NZ Herald
“Two thoughts.
The first: I am going to die.
The second: I want that sock.
The earthquake took control, was in a position of command when it struck midnight Sunday, but the human spirit is indomitable and forever reaches for hope, for salvation, for dear life. I had the suspicion there was something heroic in my efforts, as I crouched under a table in my hotel room on the seventh floor in downtown Wellington, to reach out for a sock.
I needed that sock.”
A Brown Girl’s Dilemma - Duncan Greive, The Spinoff
“I’ll tell the story that made me feel like writing the song. Boarding a plane a while ago – 2008 or something – this was boarding from L.A coming back to New Zealand.
I was on a first class ticket. I was sitting down in my seat and this air hostess told me to get out, she said ‘you’re in the wrong place,’
She hadn’t even looked at my ticket yet! But I knew where I was supposed to be sitting. Then she looked at the ticket and she was like “oh…”
What Normalization Means - Hua Hsu, The New Yorker
"In the summer of 2008, I reached out to Killer Mike again, while I was working on a piece for The Atlantic about Barack Obama’s candidacy. I asked Mike if he remembered what he had said a few years earlier. He did. But the hypothetical President he had in mind, he said, was some “cool white boy.” We laughed: the very premise of a black President was, just a few years earlier, unfathomable. It was normal to presume that someone who looked like him would never ascend to that seat."
The Doctor Is In (Your Pocket): How Apps Are Harnessing Music’s Healing Powers - Marisa Aveling, Pitchfork
“Before it happened, it seemed like just another day. As usual, Sean headed to the gym. Partway through his workout, though, the 22-year-old came up from a squat and felt what he thought was a burst of water in his head. As blood began seeping into his brain, Sean wobbled over to the bench and struggled to keep himself upright. He was rushed into emergency surgery and spent 36 hours lying in a coma before waking up to discover that, following his stroke, he couldn’t move the left side of his body.”
A Tribe called Quest: “We May Be Tired And Upset But We’re Not Going To Quit” - Lakin Starling, The Fader
“I don’t care how much you depreciated our population in this country and extended the idea of slavery through mass incarceration and uneven policing. You may be diminishing our numbers but you’re never going to diminish our stories.”
