I’m so happy to see this article finally published! Thank you @afrosypaella.bsky.social for including me in this piece. It’s beautifully written and captures the the irony of being from Ohio where the history is rich and fraught. Thank you for being a witness ❤️

Who preserves the homes of Black literary giants | Nneka M Okona

I wrote this and put my soul into it bc it felt so deeply urgent. Thanks to @taralconley.com for speaking to me + adding her voice among many, many others as you can read. Will properly say more about this tmrw but am about to enjoy the rest of my holiday weekend & a glass of cava to celebrate! :)

I'm going on a cruise next week that retails for $14K so I guess that? I'm not paying for this by the way. Travel journalist perks. :)

A lot of y'all are hellbent on being boring as fuck. Barely 30 and talking about your 7 p.m. bedtimes and not leaving the house after 1 p.m. I'll be 40 next year and am confused at this because I go to bed late and stay out late, too. Aging does not mean rotting at home.

Some of y’all noticed I’ve been uncharacteristically offline. This is why, and I remain on leave for a few weeks to handle a PTSD relapse. CJR was dogged in its pursuit of my story. Because of what I do and who I am, I felt that I had to answer their questions honestly. www.cjr.org/feature-2/we...

Some news: this piece was selected as one of the 20 *best* pieces of food and travel writing for 2024! So honored and excited. My first anthology! 🥹

We’re thrilled to announce that Magical/Realism by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal has been nominated for the 35th Annual Reading the West Book Awards in the Memoir/Biography category! Now it’s your turn to vote by May 31st. Winners announced June 12, 2025.

We spent the Pornhub Awards with some of the site’s biggest stars to talk censorship, making money, and the popularity of trans porn—all while the site is blocked in more than a third of US states. www.wired.com/story/pornhu...

Was gonna go out tonight but decided to stay home to make gumbo and drink wine.

I’m delighted to share that I was selected as one of @ijnr.bsky.social’s Environmental Justice grantees to write about ecological grief (e.g. climate grief) of Black communities in the South for @prismreports.org. Honored to do this work & filled with gratitude for being supported. Let’s get it! ⚡️💥

It’s harder than it used to be but not hopeless. I think writers—especially those who work in media—are being called to do something different + not rely on traditional structures in the same way we used to as they’re *all* crumbling now. It’ll take creativity, innovation & grit to carry us forth.

The NYT isn't up for this moment because if you look at their history they've always missed the moment. As "the publication of record" it shouldn't exist. The American public deserves better.

Racism and misogynoir.

Our generation has a loooot to learn about actually being *in* community with folks. Being a host does not necessarily mean you do it all yourself nor pay for it all yourself either. It is a communal effort. With our parents it was always a shared effort despite how it appeared!

Seems like a lot of folk who identify as Type A have undiagnosed anxiety.

Harvard will not comply with the Trump administration’s demands to dismantle its diversity programming and limit student protests in exchange for its federal funding, the university president announced www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

Journalism has always been an enforcer & willing participant of white supremacy. Lynchings and other acts of racist hate + violence were promoted & published in newspapers remember. Let’s not forget this especially now.

Self-deprecating takes on writing and being a writer just never hit for me. It’s not a tone I like or appreciate. A lot of you are miserable & insecure and bring those things into your creative practice droning on and on about how much you hate writing. Deeply uninteresting.

We really *need* more Black writers to write biographies of our Black figures. Doing some preliminary research on Duke Ellington for this essay I’m working on. And I’m struggling because what is written about him is so racist. Revelatory in some respects but racist.

here’s a curse word free version of “look it up” as requested by countless teachers and librarians 🥰😘

It’s the birthday of Billie Holiday, a survivor of abuse & an enemy of the state who was targeted by the FBI through her use of narcotics for bringing lynching to light, & died handcuffed to her hospital bed.

When we worry about the declining rates of literacy and a lack of reading skills, it's often about children. But how often are adults reading these days? And what are we reading? A new NPR/Ipsos poll finds out.

An unsecured database used by a generative AI app revealed prompts and tens of thousands of explicit images—including child abuse material and de-aged celebrities. The company deleted its websites after WIRED reached out.

Music not good, dancing hasn’t been good in at least a decade, vocals have not further developed at all, etc.

Mused about Dr. King’s loneliness, isolation and depression as a result of the political trauma he faced on the 57th anniversary of his death. My latest essay for the black alone, a new creative project from me exploring Black loneliness. theblackalone.substack.com/p/the-lonely...

The fact that Keisha Lance Bottoms wants to run for governor of Georgia in 2026 is a joke. Georgia deserves elected officials that give a damn about us and not being opportunistic scammers. Black representational politics has never and will never save us.

High maintenance, big bitch. Ask about me. 😭

I think a lot more of us need to admit that we were indoctrinated with verbal cruelty. None of us needs “tough love” even if you think you do because it is almost always someone abandoning kindness to shame but disguising it as some virtuous, loving pursuit. When it isn’t and will never be.

And if you want to take it a step further, California as a state has a shocking number of active extremist groups & movements, far more than in most Southern states.

As a (Black) culture writer myself, I’d like to say that more of us aren’t here because it’s a bit…dull tbh. I barely use this account because the sparkle and wit is just not here for me at all.

Exclusive: Palestinian activist and recent Columbia graduate, Mahmoud Khalil, speaks out for the first time since being detained by federal immigration authorities.

FOIA requests showed our president referred to our students’ encampment as “pro terror.” as a scholar of criminalization it is very clarifying to know that what happened to our students on the ground occurred because of that frame.

I see my work now as a reclamation + refutation of the erasure of Black narratives, lives & histories (that mainstream media *also* steadily participates in). This is why archival work, record-keeping, mapping, etc. are so vital right now. Consider how you can do this work, too, even in small ways.

Today marks the anniversary of the assassination of my college classmate, Marielle Franco. She was a Rio City Councilwoman, who Rio's Police Chief assassinated for investigating paramilitary gangs in Brazil. Her story continues to inspire! paydayreport.com/a-sabbath-pr...

I hope this doesn’t sound cruel but: glad to see that the entire world knows what I have known about Wesley for years. Had some unsavory interactions with him years ago and just blocked him on everything. He is not a good person and these complaints should be believed as truth.

Can't wait to check out this book. Thanks sis!! @afrosypaella.bsky.social

Today is the birthday of my dearest closest friend who was truly the best human I’ve ever known. The best friend I’ve ever had. She would’ve been 38 today. All the life that has happened in 8 years & I’m still at the very basic of missing her. It’s a quiet wonder, a quiet grief.

Delighted to share that I’m teaching food writing next month! 🍽️ www.nnekamokona.com/writing-food...

Missing my Mom this morning and somehow in cleaning I stumbled across several funeral programs for my family in Alabama? Like…there’s a funeral program for a relative that was born in 1905 in Alabama. Do you know what a genealogical goldmine this is? 🥹

I got to talk to @karimzidan.com about his incredible and important work, and he did not mince words about the ways the rest of the sports journalism industry is (continuously) failing to meet the moment.

Thinking a lot about the belief that humans are overwhelmingly mostly healthy and normal and that an increase in chronic illness diagnosis is due to overdiagnosis when it’s actually that chronic illness/disease is the norm and we’ve been not detecting most of it www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

After a long hiatus due to my own grief, the dead zine is back baby! In this last issue of Season 1 on food, I wrote about the last meal my Dad ate before his death, using meals as rituals for endings and the last meals of those incarcerated on death row. thedeadzine.beehiiv.com/p/the-grief-...

After a long hiatus due to my own grief, the dead zine is back baby! In this last issue of Season 1 on food, I wrote about the last meal my Dad ate before his death, using meals as rituals for endings and the last meals of those incarcerated on death row. thedeadzine.beehiiv.com/p/the-grief-...

Tech layoffs hit me last week and I cannot put into enough words how glad I am to not be in that environment anymore. Tech is a cesspool of toxicity right now that is truly frightening.

NEW: @law360.bsky.social has created a *public* database of legal cases involving President Trump's executive orders and other actions. The data is searchable and sortable and will be updated regularly; links to coverage for subscribers. Graphics by @benjayingly.com www.law360.com/trump-legal-...

(It almost feels too satisfying to watch the media elite come to the same realizations I had years ago as a lowly freelancer about being on borrowed time in media and independence being the *only* path of safety + peace. Your elitism will not save you from racism & fascism.)

A WIRED investigation goes inside the Telegram groups targeting women who joined “Are We Dating the Same Guy?” groups on Facebook with doxing, harassment, and sharing of nonconsensual intimate images.

That moment you start to feel like you can’t see anything through your glasses & think your vision is getting worse is precisely the moment when you should go clean them. Go clean your glasses, babe.

It’s apparent to me that most have no idea what nervous system regulation actually means. People use those terms so flippantly like they did with self-care and boundaries.