Community
May 20, 2025
Is New York City’s Textured Hair Law Working?
In 2023, New York adopted a bill for salons to include training for textured hair Nearly two years later, has the law made a difference? Or are Black women still getting excluded from luxury hair treatment spaces?
May 20, 2025
Forza Is the Studio. Sydney Dumler Is the Brand.
Sydney Dumler created the Pilates studio of many people’s dreams. Women walk around in Forza sweatshirts and biker shorts, a la Princess Diana. SunLife Organics offers a Matcha, coconut sorbet, and raspberry smoothie called “Expensive,” which shares a name with Forza’s signature candle scent.
May 19, 2025
The Forgotten Stories of Southern Journalism
I drove three hours to talk with my grandmother about her years as an award-winning journalist. Her story began when she felt compelled to tell someone else’s—a man who had just written his first big country hit. It was the late 1980s when she cold-called the Mobile Press-Register, Alabama’s oldest newspaper, and pitched a feature.
May 19, 2025
Displacement, Development, and the Fight for Home
"It’s like they’re building a city for someone else." As new high-end housing reshapes Linden, longtime residents like the Consuegras struggle to survive, caught in a crisis of affordability, community loss, and political inaction.
May 14, 2025
From Radio Waves to Photo Frames: A Tribute to the Godfather of Black Radio
It was the early 1980s. On any given Sunday, over the loud horns and hustling New Yorkers, you would hear Hal Jackson hosting the top-rated “Sunday Classics” on 107.5 WBLS, playing records by everyone from Prince to Michael Jackson, and Whitney Houston at a time when Black artists weren’t played on the radio as much. Each week, whenever Hal gave away CDs or concert tickets on air, his wife of then-15 years, Debi B, would be on phone duty, writing down winners’ names on a sheet of paper and handing it to Hal to announce. One day, he asked her to make the announcement.