Leslie Streeter

1 week ago | thebaltimorebanner.com | Leslie Streeter

Could 100 unarmed men win a fight with a silverback gorilla? That question has been posed before — on Reddit in 2020, on TikTok in 2022 — but gained viral steam across platforms recently when mega YouTuber MrBeast joked about looking for volunteers to embrace the challenge. As the mom of a tween MrBeast fan, though, I know enough about him to wonder if he was joking. Everyone from Shaquille O’Neal to primate experts have weighed in on the answer.

1 week ago | thebaltimorebanner.com | Leslie Streeter

In February, Philadelphia-area author Hannah Levin found out she’d been accepted to participate in A Million Lives Book Festival, a convention of fantasy authors, narrators and influencers to be held the first weekend of May at the Baltimore Convention Center. As a new author whose debut novel, “The Treasured One,” was published by Aethon Books in 2024, she was excited about the event. “We thought it would be a big thing for us,” she said. It was a big thing, but not in the way anyone expected.

1 week ago | thebaltimorebanner.com | Leslie Streeter

One of the most wearying factors of our current American nightmare is that the erosion of rights, the dipping economy and our cooling reception in the world have formed a sort of national cohesion — the kind you find in hostages. But every once in a while, even the most clear-eyed and well-meaning of us will say something that betrays the truth that America, as a concept, was never a singular place with a reality that existed for all of us equally.

2 weeks ago | thebaltimorebanner.com | Leslie Streeter

In ninth grade, Jawauna Greene snuck out of the house to go across town to roller rink Rhythm Skate on Reisterstown Road to see The SOS Band (this might be the most perfectly ’80s sentence I have ever written). Unfortunately, she had no ride back, and by the time she returned home, it was 6 a.m. Her mother was not pleased. “She was sitting at the table with a cup of coffee, ready to kill me,” Greene said.

2 weeks ago | thebaltimorebanner.com | Leslie Streeter

I turned 54 this weekend. That means I’m just one year from officially being an Old. This determination is not based on how I personally feel about my transition from viable human to unsettling crone, but on how other people — specifically television advertisers — feel about me. I have officially begun my last year in the so-called “key demographic” of 18-54, the age group most coveted by those advertisers.