Hanif Abdurraqib

5 days ago | texasmonthly.com | Hanif Abdurraqib

The modest houses look like those one might see lining middle-class neighborhoods in any American city. Lawns fade from lush green to light brown. Signs dot the yards: local ballot measures or county commissioner races. At the top of the block, on East Annie Street in the Historic Southside neighborhood of Fort Worth, sits a house that looks well loved, its front yard surrounded by a wrought iron fence and lined with shrubbery. This is where Opal Lee’s childhood home once burned.

3 weeks ago | newyorker.com | Hanif Abdurraqib

The Joke I tell that no one laughs at goes like this: I picked a pretty rough time to actually want to be alive; in retrospect, back when I wanted to die, things were not actually all that bad. In the office of my therapist, this formulation elicits a heavy sigh. Among friends, it prompts a look of concern. I can’t locate the punch line, even as I type it out. The joke is that I was once heartbroken enough to invent my own apocalypse.

1 month ago | archive.is | Sarah Stillman |Steve Martin |Adam Levin |Hanif Abdurraqib

Finally, on August 16, 2022, nearly four months after her arrest, Mary entered the courtroom in a wheelchair. The judge had no inkling of Mary’s former radiance. Still, he seemed stunned by her skeletal frame. “What are we going to do, Mary?” Judge Howard Fell asked. Mary, who’d been chatty and energetic just months earlier, was too far gone to speak. “She is, as you can see, a shell,” Edminson, her public defender, said. “She needs care immediately.

1 month ago | newyorker.com | Hanif Abdurraqib

In the immediate aftermath of a sports fan’s heartbreak, there is that sliver of time during which all the emotion passes across their face. The features are contorted or frozen in place. The eyes are wide open and staring into the empty space where something wonderful has just unfolded for someone else. The mouth is open just enough, perhaps because a shout of ecstasy had been ready to escape, if only the fan’s knocking at the door of the ecstatic had been answered.

2 months ago | link.newyorker.com | Pauline Kael |Nathan Heller |Hanif Abdurraqib |Dhruv Khullar

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