✉️: Goodbye, April — Welcome To May (2025)

A New Route Home

Letter From African America (April/May 2025)

Dear readers,

Writing you here, freshly back in Brooklyn from my European vacation with the in-laws and at the tail end of having COVID as I generally catch up on all of the American chaos I’ve missed. But that’s how it goes these days, isn’t it? A little bit of good with a little bit of bad. Luckily, as the great poets, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, once sang, “I like pleasure spiked with pain” and this newsletter, my friends… is my aeroplane. It’s my aeroplane.

In my recent You Are The Genre interview with Felipe Torres Medina (where we discussed his new book America, Let Me In: A Choose Your Immigration Story) I suggested that the beauty of immigrant stories is that they tend to capture that “aha” feeling you get when you take a new route home.

Turns out, I really needed that recent break because I’m feeling the that sweet “aha” buzz right now. The downside is that many of the things I release regularly here have been delayed. It’s why this particular letter doubles as one for April and May. But it’s certainly better than having a half-baked version of those things floating in your inboxes. In fact, as of this release, I’m going to send these monthly letters as just that; monthly letters that paid subscribers get full access to— with the supporting elements appearing as separate posts.

The vacation was not one that I initiated as I embarrassingly, personally, don’t have the resources. But I needed this escape from a certain sort of routine, a certain sort of political chaos, and a certain sort of unease that everyone in entertainment has been feeling.

And now that I’ve taken a new route home, I have fresh context for just about everything that feels like a mental reset button has been pressed.