Niela Orr

Wisconsin

Story Editor and Critic at The New York Times Magazine

Writer. Editor @NYTMag Then @PopUpMag @believermag Words @LRB @thebafflermag niela.orr(at)https://t.co/ipQUgtfLSw (Non-NYT queries only :-) Pitch NYT email; I don't check DMs

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Articles

Cannonball With Wesley Morris: My Love Affair With Bruno Mars

2 days ago | nytimes.com | Wesley Morris |Niela Orr |Janelle Anderson |Elyssa Dudley

June 26, 2025, 5:03 a.m. ETListen to and watch ‘Cannonball’: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTube | iHeartRadioJanelle AndersonElyssa Dudley and Dan Powell and Wesley Morris has a confession to make: He loves Bruno Mars. Nothing wrong with that, right? With the help of the culture writer Niela Orr, Wesley untangles his crush from his discomfort with the pop star’s cozy relationship to Blackness.
Niela Orr · Sinnermen

1 week ago | lrb.co.uk | Niela Orr

Ryan Coogler’s horror movie Sinners is (so far) the pop cultural sensation of the second Trump administration. Elijah and Elias Moore, aka Smoke and Stack, twin brothers played by an alternately caddish and cantankerous Michael B. Jordan, return home to Clarksdale in the Mississippi Delta in 1932. Smoke and Stack aren’t content to take on a sharecropper’s plot, but want to be entrepreneurial New Negroes.
Loose Exegesis | Alina Stefanescu

3 weeks ago | thebaffler.com | Alina Stefanescu |Niela Orr |Airea D. Matthews |Maura Mahoney

a gender-modiﬁed golden shovel of Revelations 17:6And how the pros sparkled! I thought I’d play this game bestwhen playing my betters. Up close to the net, pivotless,I felt myself most alive when being slaughtered. Everyonesaw the shame, how swiftly it came to its descendant. Dark heirsthen cookies in a star tin. I licked the sweetness from each surface. I thought I could handle it. Maybe a teeny tinge evenwondered.
Los 6 momentos que consagraron a Kendrick Lamar

Feb 9, 2025 | nytimes.com | Niela Orr

Kendrick Lamar actúa como alguien que revela un secreto. En la canción de 2015, "King Kunta", susurra de forma escénica: "Juré que no lo contaría", y luego procede a alardear de los chismes de la industria musical sin dar nombres. Aunque el rapero ganador de un Grammy y del Pulitzer domina la opacidad literaria en su música -usa de manera generosa los cambios de perspectiva y las alusiones-, en los videos y en las actuaciones en directo, sus expresivas puestas en escena parecen poesía visual.
How Kendrick Lamar's Performances Led Him to the Super Bowl Halftime Show

Feb 6, 2025 | nytimes.com | Niela Orr

Kendrick Lamar performs like someone parceling out a secret. On the 2015 single "King Kunta," he stage-whispers, "I swore I wouldn't tell," and then proceeds to flaunt industry gossip without naming names. Though the Grammy-hoarding, Pulitzer Prize-winning rapper has mastered literary opacity in his music - he's a generous user of perspective shifts and allusion - in videos and in live performances, Lamar's expressive stagings strike like visual poetry.
Certified Boogeyman

Dec 3, 2024 | lrb.co.uk | Niela Orr

In 1983, an emcee named Captain Rapp recorded and released ‘Bad Times (I Can’t Stand It)’, one of the West Coast’s first rap hits. The seven-minute song, which reached number 23 in the Billboard Dance charts, is an epic list of social ills – including gang violence, inflation, hurricanes, Aids, the threat of nuclear war, the civil war in El Salvador and child abuse – orated over synthy electro-funk. Rapp, aka Larry Earl Glenn, was an air force veteran living in Long Beach, California.
An Interview with Creed Bratton

Jul 10, 2024 | thebeliever.net | Niela Orr

Niela Orr Creed Bratton is an enigma. As is the case with Creed Bratton, the character he played on the American version of The Office, his persona is bound up with incredible lore—some of it misinformation that threatens to become canon. There’s a rumor that Jimi Hendrix once taught him how to play a guitar riff.
The Karen Horney Progressions

Jun 3, 2024 | thebaffler.com | Rachael Wilson |Niela Orr |T.M. Brown |Arielle Isack

I once met a woman who’d beenWas her name Karen Horney? I once met a girl who’d beenand now my story’s begun. and now my story is done. I once met a woman who’d beenrun over by a dump truck. Her name, let’s say, was Karen Horney.
High Expectations

Jun 3, 2024 | thebaffler.com | Baynard Woods |Niela Orr |Arvin Alaigh

I was sitting in my apartment, annoyed and paranoid, as the phone rang for the tenth time that night. Word had reached my circle of stoners that I was holding a quarter pound of pot, and I had become their all-hours dispensary of dry Mexican brick weed. This was, I supposed, the life of the dealer. I hadn’t foreseen that a side hustle was going to work its way into my otherwise deadbeat, layabout lifestyle when a wiry construction worker/weed dealer with Ric Flair hair offered to front me a QP.
The Literary Lexicon of RaMell Ross

May 14, 2024 | oxfordamerican.org | Niela Orr

Brothers Z, by RaMell Ross. From his book Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body, published in 2023 by MACK. All images courtesy the artist and MACK The photographer’s oeuvre is suffused with narrative wonder and Southern Gothic wit I turn to art when I feel lost or confused by the news. As counterintuitive as it may seem, it helps to engage with art to get a better grip on how things feel—politically, emotionally—rather than what they mean.