Hanif Abdurraqib

2 weeks ago | lithub.com | Hanif Abdurraqib

No One Makes “Yo Mama” Jokes After the FuneralArticle continues after advertisementWhich is its own kind of joke. I don’t make the rules about the decorum of the dozens, but I got good at the dozens because I knew I didn’t want to fight. I could have fought, probably. I was the youngest of four, with two aggressive older brothers, and so I got my ass kicked plenty, and through a series of ass-whuppins, one learns how to at least hold one’s own. At least survive.

2 weeks ago | newyorker.com | Hanif Abdurraqib

In May of 1971, Marvin Gaye released what many consider to be his masterwork, “What’s Going On?” A song cycle told from the point of view of a Vietnam veteran returning to the United States after serving abroad, having witnessed all manner of suffering, violence, and injustice, it is not an entirely idyllic album.

3 weeks 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.

1 month 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.

2 months 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.