I dove to the wreck of Brazil’s last slave ship—and wrote about the global network of maritime archeologists excavating the Middle Passage newyorker.com/magazine/2025/…

Rebecca Mead .Julian Lucas reports on the Slave Wrecks Project, a global network of maritime archeologists working to excavate wrecks of slave ships and to reconnect Black communities to the deep. nyer.cm/3r5uRU8

The slave ship Camargo carried 500 souls across the Atlantic before it burned and sank off the coast of Brazil. For his most recent New Yorker piece, Julian Lucas explored its remains with a global network of maritime archeologists. Read it here: nyer.cm/XjftlsU

French senator perfectly describes the Trump situation.

I wrote about why the movies feel so heavy handed these days. Say less! (Literally.) newyorker.com/culture/critic…

Trump is purging the federal web in a digital book burning of unprecedented scale. I wrote about the librarians and “data hoarders” who are backing it up as fast as they can newyorker.com/news/the-lede/…

The Trump Administration is laying waste to masses of government records. On this front, at least, it’s facing well-organized resistance, from a loose coalition of archivists and librarians—“nerds who care.” nyer.cm/9eqxovV

this is torture nhpr.org/nh-news/2025-0…

You can draw a straight line from “extraordinary renditions” to this. Every exception is precedent. And in geopolitics and when unchecked, every precedent is escalation.

Lorna Simpson is “contemporary art’s astronomer of the archives, always searching for the dark matter that ‘documentary’ images conceal,” Julian Lucas writes. Read a new profile of the artist who uses archival material to challenge ways of looking. nyer.cm/B6BcCkc

“People are comforted by a rendering of a figure. It satisfies a particular kind of desire around presence. For me? I like to complicate.” I profiled Lorna Simpson—artist, eBay fiend, and Brooklyn institution—for The New Yorker’s centenary issue on NYC newyorker.com/magazine/2025/…

Thrilled to reveal the cover for my forthcoming book, ON MORRISON, out from Hogarth Books January 27, 2026! Thank you to @People Magazine for the announcement (link in thread).

"Audition is the author’s most ambitious work, a nervy tale that turns on itself to test the boundaries of the novel form." lovia in Books and the Arts on Katie Kitamura's Audition and the divided selves that populate her fiction thenation.com/article/cultur…

I wrote about a literary profile that disillusioned me about an idol—and showed me what the form can do. On Hilton Als’s “The Islander,” a portrait of Derek Walcott The New Yorker newyorker.com/magazine/takes…

Honored to have had the chance to spend time and share words with this literary genius and revolutionary before his passing. theparisreview.org/interviews/788…

Jack Whitten made it his life’s mission to give abstraction soul. I wrote about the restless experimentalism behind the artist’s magnificent retrospective at MoMA The Museum of Modern Art newyorker.com/culture/the-ar…

Belated post: earlier this year, The New Yorker ran a powerful piece by Julian Lucas on the Slave Wrecks Project, a network that combines maritime archaeology and reparative justice. It traces the beginnings of the project to the 2015 discovery of the São José - the first known wreck