In June of 2012, GQ’s Amy Wallace wrote a profile of the singer D’Angelo, hailing his return to the stage after more than a decade of isolation, drug problems, alcoholism, and no new music for his fans to hear. “So when will he release his new album?” Wallace asked. “D can’t say for sure.” Though D’Angelo has been playing concerts in Europe and the United States for more than two years now, it wasn’t until last Sunday that he released a new album, “Black Messiah,” which many of his die-hard fans feared would never come. Wallace charts D’Angelo’s rise to stardom in the early two-thousands and the almost mythic absence that followed. D’Angelo fans can re-read her article knowing that the long wait has paid off.
In the January, 2015, issue of California Sunday, John Gilber provides a detailed account of the events of September 26, 2014, the day when forty-three students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos teacher-training college, in Ayotzinapa, Mexico, went missing. (Francisco Goldman wrote a series for this site about the political upheaval in Mexico following the tragedy.) Students at the school, Gilber writes, come from “the most economically battered places in the hemisphere”; lacking vehicles or a budget for transportation, they often commandeer buses along highways in order to travel to schools in other cities, a transportation method that officials view as “outright robbery.” On September 26th, students aboard five buses were attacked by police and gunmen in Iguala, where a political rally attended by the city’s mayor, José Luis Abarca, and his wife was taking place. Based on interviews with survivors and other witnesses of the incident, Gilber re-creates the bloody confrontation that ensued, in which three people were killed, more than twenty were injured, and the forty-three students were hauled off and never heard from again.
At ProPublica, Nikole Hannah-Jones writes about a “more subtle, ongoing racial injustice” revealed by the Michael Brown tragedy: the persistence of school segregation, in St. Louis and elsewhere. In the early nineteen-eighties, finally responding to Brown v. Board of Education, St. Louis began what was, Hannah-Jones writes, “heralded by researchers and educators as the nation’s most successful metro-wide desegregation program.” But the program, unpopular with white residents of the city, quickly came under assault from politicians, and was eventually converted into a voluntary program that, today, is a “shadow of what it once was.” Most of Brown’s peers, Hannah-Jones writes, “will not die at the hands of police.” Instead, “they will face the future that Brown would have faced if he had lived. That is, to have the outcome of their lives deeply circumscribed by what they learn and experience in their segregated, inferior schools.”
