Two Sister-Poets Gone Too Soon: Ntozake Shange and My Sister (The New Yorker)

Written by Hilton Als and originally published in The New Yorker:

I am writing this a day after my favorite sister’s birthday. She was very dear to me. She would have been sixty-nine this fall. She died two years ago, another casualty of M.S. and poor-black-girl-in-America life. My sister’s absence became even more pronounced for me when the poet, playwright, and author Ntozake Shange died on October 27th. Shange was just seventy when she passed and had been living in an assisted-care facility in Maryland. When my sister died, she had been living in an assisted-care facility in Brooklyn. My sister’s birthday, Shange’s death—each consumed me and left me sitting in the middle of a kind of loneliness which I do not want to bear but had to bear, because I wanted to tell you something about these women, their strengths and weaknesses, and the profound effect that each had on my life and my consciousness, as a writer and a feminist.

From The New Yorker: Four Women Accuse New York’s Attorney General of Physical Abuse

Update: Three hours after the publication of this story, Schneiderman resigned from his position. “While these allegations are unrelated to my professional conduct or the operations of the office, they will effectively prevent me from leading the office’s work at this critical time,” he said in a statement. “I therefore resign my office, effective at the close of business on May 8, 2018.”

Illustration by Oliver Munday; Photograph: Drew Angerer/Getty (man)

From The New Yorker: How Michelle Wolf Blasted Open the Fictions of Journalism in the Age of Trump

On Saturday, the comedian Michelle Wolf, performing at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, delivered the most consequential monologue so far of the Donald Trump era. Some of the attendees claimed to have walked out of the dinner in protest during the performance; others, like the President’s press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, have been lauded for remaining stoically in place in the face of scathing humor.