Mychal Denzel Smith

Ludacris was once worth a million gazillion fafillion dollars, so color me unimpressed

Amy Goodman trying so hard not to smile while delivering this news

Too much news happening, just tell me how much time they’re gonna give Puffy

Giving a toddler a bath is the real cure for perfectionism, you have to accept they’re only kinda clean because there’s definitely pee in that water

Zohran Mamdani Won’t Defund the Police. The Movement Can Grow With Him Anyway. It wouldn’t be savvy politics for Mamdani to run on defunding the police. Eric Adams and Andrew Cuomo know that.

"Mamdani’s opponents understand that defund is toxic, which is why they want to tie the mayoral frontrunner to his previous stance," writes @mychaldenzelsmith.bsky.social.

That's not intelligence, it's a bankrupt view of humanity

Basically, if you're a successful capitalist it's assumed you must be smart, and... it's just not the case! Being a successful capitalist doesn't make you smart! You become a successful capitalist by doing exactly the kind of shady circumventing of laws (and morals) Pablo is reporting!

it's telling that in the face of all of Pablo's (really incredible) reporting, the only defense Mark Cuban can muster is "Steve Ballmer is not stupid" which is both an example of class solidarity among the ultra-wealthy and a repetition of the lie at the heart of so much of U.S. rot

Scholar's Mate - Believer Magazine If you would like to score an easy victory in chess against someone who is unfamiliar with the game, and you are playing as white (a similar idea can be employed if you are playing as black, but it is...

We're excited to share that @mychaldenzelsmith.bsky.social’s essay "Scholar's Mate" has been selected by Hanif Abdurraqib to appear in The Year’s Best Sports Writing 2025 (@triumphbooks.bsky.social). Read it now on our site.

www.thebeliever.net/scholars-mate/

Pre-order The Year's Best Sports Writing 2025 with @barnesandnoble.com: buff.ly/FBQRUv7

@mychaldenzelsmith.bsky.social @imogenwk.bsky.social @autostraddle.bsky.social @noemamag.com @theguardian.com @espn.com @levernews.com @literaryhub.bsky.social @defector.com @blockclubchi.bsky.social

This year's featured writers: Lex Pryor Kim Cross Frankie de la Cretaz Melissa Febos Daniel Ray Zito Madu Kaveh Akbar Devin G. Kelly Mac Crane Maitreyi Anantharaman Nick Hunt Katie Barnes Leyton Cassidy Zack Davis Helena Gjone Yousra Samir Imran Giri Nathan Amos Barshad Jamie Nesbitt Golden Roman Stubbs Katie Heindl Mychal Denzel Smith Lisa Williamson Rosenberg Imogen West-Knights Darrell Powell Simon Akam James Thomas Niharika Pandit Ettore Ewen (Big E) Peter Flax

Hanif Abdurraqib has curated an extraordinary collection showcasing incredible feats and diverse perspectives across the world of sports. We're honored to announce this year's featured writers! Pre-order The Year's Best Sports Writing 2025 today: buff.ly/7gs9meT

sending much love to you and your mom

For folks not in DC:
- There are full-on police checkpoints most nights
- Gangs of 30+ federal agents roam DC
- National Guard folks w/ guns patrolling a Harris Teeter
- Every day, multiple friends see ICE kidnapping ppl
- Daycares are scared to have kids go on walks due to ICE

Taught my child to say “Zohran will you please be my mayor?” so I’ll just be over here waiting for that father of the year award

…are you?

I would never try to speak for him, but I do think it’s a real belief—I think he lives in France because he’s pretentious and insufferable

The Evolution of a Beloved Postcolonial Critic and Literary Giant The essays in Jamaica Kincaid’s Putting Myself Together: Writings 1974– track the maturation of one of our most distinguished writers.

For @newrepublic.com, I wrote about Jamaica Kincaid's new collection newrepublic.com/article/1986...

Williams’s argument has found purchase among journalists he might consider fellow travelers — Yascha Mounk, Bari Weiss and Conor Friedersdorf, among others. It’s also not so new; it might remind some people of the debates about political correctness that raged in the 1990s, though Williams might balk at the comparison. He would prefer that we not invoke history (or context, or ideology, or ideas of “moral clarity”) in our debates. He’d rather we understand current events through the facts of what is happening in the here and now. We shouldn’t have tried, he says, to understand the killing of Trayvon Martin on a continuum of racial violence that includes the lynching of Emmett Till, because doing so flattened the incident into a racial drama and did not deal with specific individuals and their actions. Similarly, he argues, the murder of George Floyd should not be seen in the context of racism and police behavior, but in the light of Floyd’s poverty and drug addiction (and I suppose we are not allowed then to contextualize those factors in terms of race, or the history of labor markets, or the pharmaceutical industry — they are just individual characteristics).

a sharp review of the chatterton book that notes the author’s total refusal to engage with history and his insistence that a “serious” or “good faith” discussion requires participants to exist in an eternal present where individuals exist free of context www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/0...

❤️❤️❤️

As the author of the review, really wish you didn’t just screenshot that part as if the review was arguing something that’s very obviously not

absolutely delicious lede here

😇 thanks!

Review | Thomas Chatterton Williams is impossible to disagree with. That’s not a good thing. In “Summer of Our Discontent,” the Atlantic staff writer expands his argument that the behavior of progressives on social media and elsewhere has broken political discourse.

I, too, reviewed Thomas Chatterton Williams' new book: www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/0...

dunking on tcw summer 😎

Review | Thomas Chatterton Williams is impossible to disagree with. That’s not a good thing. In “Summer of Our Discontent,” the Atlantic staff writer expands his argument that the behavior of progressives on social media and elsewhere has broken political discourse.

I, too, reviewed Thomas Chatterton Williams' new book: www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/0...

Amy Sherald Cancels Her Smithsonian Show, Citing Censorship

Amy Sherald says the Smithsonian suggested removing a painting of a transgender woman as the Statue of Liberty from her upcoming show at the National Portrait Gallery “to avoid provoking President Trump.” Sherald: “I cannot in good conscience comply with a culture of censorship”

The Mrs. and I were talking about the character of Theo, and how the writers made him much more than his faults. As someone who struggled with certain academic courses in school, I really related to him. The more you learned about the man and his talents, the more you liked him.

Like Theo Huxtable, Malcolm-Jamal Warner Defied Expectations With Heart The actor, who died on July 20 at the age of 54, forged a career an actor that was all his own

Malcolm-Jamal Warner deserves every remembrance that is sure to come in the next days and weeks. I offer mine here, for @time.com: time.com/7304321/malc...

Like Theo Huxtable, Malcolm-Jamal Warner Defied Expectations With Heart The actor, who died on July 20 at the age of 54, forged a career an actor that was all his own

Malcolm-Jamal Warner deserves every remembrance that is sure to come in the next days and weeks. I offer mine here, for @time.com: time.com/7304321/malc...