Bylines

Lauren Michele Jackson

Refugee camp.

The Right Side of Now

Appeals against the war in Gaza are often framed through the lens of the future: “You will regret having been silent.” What about the present tense?
Black-and-white glamour photo of Josephine Baker, smiling in her stage attire.

Josephine Baker Was the Star France Wanted—and the Spy It Needed

When the night-club sensation became a Resistance agent, the Nazis never realized what she was hiding in the spotlight.
Zora Neale Hurston browsing books at a book fair, looking at a book called "American Stuff."

The Zora Neale Hurston We Don’t Talk About

In the new nonfiction collection “You Don’t Know Us Negroes,” what emerges is a writer who mastered a Black idiom but seldom championed race pride.
In the preface to a new book version of the 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, a reporter and the leading force behind the endeavor, recalls that it began as a “simple pitch.”

The 1619 Project and the Demands of Public History

The ambitious Times endeavor reveals the difficulties that greet a journalistic project when it aspires to shift a founding narrative of the past.

What We Want from Richard Wright

A newly restored novel tests an old dynamic between readers and the author of “Native Son.”
Photo of Dolly Parton smiling.

The United States of Dolly Parton

A voice for working-class women and an icon for all kinds of women, Parton has maintained her star power throughout life phases and political cycles.
Still from animated TV show Big Mouth

The Messy Politics of Black Voices—and “Black Voice”—in American Animation

Cartoons have often been considered exempt from the country’s prejudices. In fact, they form a genre built on the marble and mud of racial signification.

What Should a Slavery Epic Do?

If there’s anything the 2010s taught us, it’s that there is no getting these stories right, no honoring with grace the dead and ghosts.

The Hipster

It happens every year.

We Need to Talk About Digital Blackface in GIFs

Are you part of the problem?