New Sections. Same Mission. Here’s How I’m Organizing This Space.
What You See. What You Hear. What You Think. What About Me.
I started this Substack two months ago with one rule: write about whatever bothers or excites me enough to research. That worked more than I expected. 600 of you now. But the archive was getting messy, and I want you to find what you came for without scrolling through 20 articles and 40 notes, hoping the algorithm does its job.
So I’m organizing.
Four sections. Each one covers a different way I process the world. Here’s the breakdown.
Whacha See?
This is a film. TV. Visual media. The stories Hollywood tells and the ones it refuses to.
If you came here because of the Sinners piece, this is your section. Same for the Green Book/BlacKkKlansman essay, the Mercy copaganda breakdown, or the Ted Lasso piece.
I write about what’s on screen, like Ted Lasso and my appreciation for it. But more than that, I write about who controls the screen. Who gets the prestige red carpet rollout and who gets the quiet release? Who gets called a genius and who gets called “promising.” What the camera shows you and what it leaves out on purpose.
The Wayans brothers built modern comedy and got written out of their own story. Ryan Coogler made an original film that grossed $368 million, and Variety questioned whether it was a real success. Jordan Peele reclaimed the cowboy from conservative mythology. These are “What You See” stories.
If you watch movies and TV and something feels off but you can’t name it, this section is for you.
Whacha Hear
Music. Sound. Language. The spoken word.
Kendrick Lamar lives here. So, does the piece on how “ain’t nobody wrong” captures an entire culture in three words that grammar textbooks call a mistake?
I’m a person who believes music tells truths that essays can’t always reach, mainly due to the gatekeeping in academia. When Kendrick raps about buying a homeless man a meal and still getting judged by God, that’s theology. When a blues riff shows up in a vampire movie set in 1933 Mississippi, when Delta Slim remembers the lynching of his brothers, that’s history you feel before you understand it.
This section is about what you hear and what it means. The music that shaped us. The language that defines us. The sounds that carry more weight than any essay I could write on politics.
Whacha Think
Systems. Money. Power. Who benefits.
This is the political economy section. Private equity is gutting businesses. Big Oil running foreign policy. Super PACs buying elections. Peter Thiel building a surveillance database while the government defunds public media. ICE killing a U.S. citizen in Minneapolis and calling it an immigration raid.
If the question is “why does this keep happening,” the answer is usually in the money. Follow it far enough and you find the system. That’s what this section does.
I also put the tech surveillance pieces here. Ring doorbells feeding footage to police. Flock cameras are tracking your license plate. The College of Charleston is quietly removing LGBTQ+ housing protections. These are all the same story: institutions choosing control over people.
Stats, media literacy, and the manufactured outrage machine live here too. If you read the piece about how TPUSA creates fake martyrs on college campuses, you’ve already been here. If you read the one about how crime statistics are really policing statistics, same.
This section exists because most of the things you’re angry about were designed to make you angry. The question is: who designed them and why.
What About Me
Personal essays. Philosophy. Book reviews. The writing craft. Poetry. Alpha Phi Alpha history.
This is the section where I stop analyzing larger systems and start analyzing myself and my thoughts about the world, and my experiences in it.
About Time and learning that grief isn’t something you fix. Book reviews of Travels with Epicurus and Ways to Live Forever. The piece about writing faster without writing worse.
My Alpha history pieces live here, too. The MLK Day speech. The seven Alpha men who won thirteen medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Fritz Pollard, the first Black head coach in the NFL.
These feel personal because they are. The fraternity pieces are about my people. The film essays in this section are about my life. The craft pieces are about my process.
If the other three sections are me looking at the world, this one is me looking in the mirror.
Why This Matters
I write about culture, power, and the space between what we’re told and what’s true. That hasn’t changed. But now there’s a map.
You don’t have to read everything. Some of you are here for the film criticism. Some of you want the political analysis. Some of you showed up for one Kendrick essay and stuck around. All of that is fine.
The sections help you find what you want. They help me see what I’m building. And they give new readers a front door instead of a pile of posts.
Same mission. Better architecture.
See you in the next one.
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