August 7, 2025 First Person The United States vs. Sean Combs By Harmony Holiday Sean Combs in 2010. Photograph by John Seb Barber, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 2.0. A Great Villain Is a Great American Prisons are American tourist attractions, and criminals who become fugitives or inmates our outlaw heroes—Al Capone, Alcatraz, Charles Manson, Sing Sing, Angola, Luigi Mangione, O. J. Simpson, Diddy, né Sean Combs. A collective underdog fetish means that the image of a civilian outwitting, outrunning, or confronting “the man” is enough to negate his trespasses. Maybe achieving the apotheosis of success in the United States requires becoming a convict, being threatened with or facing real incarceration and exile, doing time, paying dues, and making a grand comeback. At that finale you can sell that story to restore your fortunes, dignity, and maverick glory. Combs is the latest public figure to go from celebrated to disgraced to tentatively redeemed in some eyes by a show trial and the masculine compulsion to cheer when men get away with terrorizing women. The rapper Jay Electronica stood outside of the courtroom with his two Great Danes on the day the verdict was delivered, and announced, “I’m just here supporting my brother.” He looked half-ashamed, half-deviant about it, like he was both courting and afraid of backlash. Others call Diddy’s comeuppance a legal lynching, insinuating he’s a survivor of a because-he’s-black character assassination, since other powerful, abusive men have yet to be held accountable. It’s a truly American malfunction, this belief that the once oppressed should have the freedom to become as evil and ruthlessly decadent as their oppressors. This is what is sold to the public as prestige, and imitations of it exist at every stratum. With this in mind, Diddy’s story could be construed as a bootstraps tale—from Harlem to Howard to Hollywood endings. His recent downward spiral might be just another buoy, one that will help him ascend anew. Hip-hop music understands this about the American subconscious, taps into these delusions of impunity for material, and dresses its best emcees in rap sheets, threats, beef, high and low-level street violence—sometimes actual death and martyrdom. Even the so-called success stories who sell the genre out to the mainstream cannot be too clean—they better be rumored to run a trap house, attract a harem of groupies, and defy the legal system if they expect to maintain credibility. As the wealth of those at the top has increased, their criminality has grown reckless and entitled, blasé even, but no less compulsory. Now it’s tied more to contracts, NDAs, and designer drugs than to desperation to break through; they run media companies, liquor brands, parts of the NFL. In June 2022 Diddy was granted BET’s Lifetime Achievement Award and thanked, among others, Cassie Ventura, his on-and-off girlfriend between 2011 and 2018, for holding him down in the dark times. That same year, he dressed as the Joker for Halloween. He was so creepy and persuasive in his white face and sleaze that many didn’t know it was him in the costume; it felt like a mimed confession of his true attributes. In 2023, New York’s mayor, Eric Adams, presented Diddy with the coveted key to the city. The key was returned the following summer, after news began circulating that Combs had abused Ventura. In September of 2024, Combs was taken into custody by the Southern District of New York and held without bail on RICO charges of sex trafficking by force, fraud, or coercion and transportation to engage in prostitution. He was considered a flight risk and a threat to potential witnesses. His loyalists formed a hush harbor. This month, he was acquitted of the most serious charges and cheered on by many who seem to feel vicariously acquitted themselves ready to get back to a White Party or freak-off; when he’s released from prison, it seems likely he’ll be offered a hero’s reentry, a new lease on cultural domination and indiscriminate sexcapades, a new deal, as if he’s some kind of New Age abolitionist. Villainy was good for business. Read More
July 17, 2025 First Person The Same Damned Thing Over and Over By J. D. Daniels Photograph courtesy of J.D. Daniels. I knew a girl. Her hobbies included telling me I was wrong about my own life. More than once she said to me, “You say that you feel trapped in your past, and everything is repeating. I don’t understand that. Everything feels new to me, all the time,” and she struck a heroic pose, despite the fact that we had already had this argument forty times. Ladies and gentlemen, for your entertainment, we now present, snarling at each other, the world’s smartest ants. “Those who cannot remember the past,” wrote Santayana, “are condemned to repeat it.” Not as impressive as it seems, because those who can remember the past are also condemned to repeat it. It’s the only thing that ever happens: the past repeats itself. Everyone is condemned to repeat the past. The question is whether you are able to admit it or not. My mamaw used to say, “I thought life was just one damned thing after another until I realized it’s the same damned thing over and over.” Read More
July 3, 2025 First Person Monks in Jersey By Simon Wu We came in two cars. A white Honda Odyssey, the back row of seats kowtowed under great reams of toilet paper. Everything else—cartons of grapes, jugs of water, Tupperwares of cut fruit, all of our modern alms—in the trunk. The rest in a white Toyota Corolla. Two cars full of supplies and people for a weekend of living more with less. Not for camping, but for monkhood. “You all will need to unload the car when we get there,” my mom said, patting foundation over her face in the passenger seat mirror. “I can’t move very much in this dress.” She was wearing a high-neck gold dress covered with embroidered flowers and tiny tassels. It was one of three dresses that she had sewn with fabric ordered from Burma months ago. She wanted to have options, she’d said. Read More
June 4, 2025 First Person 1988–? By Eileen Chang Zhang Ailing in 1954. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. The old-time Overseas Chinese call Los Angeles “Luo Sheng.” It’s a phonetic transliteration, just like “Lo Shan,” the shortened form of “Lo Shan Ji” [Los Angeles]. But when it’s cut to two syllables, with “Sheng” at the end, those not familiar with the term could think it refers to a U.S. state—a short form of Louisiana, maybe? This city does cover a huge area, though it’s not as big as a state. It’s famous for being a “Mecca of Car Culture,” lots of cars, late models, everywhere—everyone has a car, hence the terrible bus service. It’s bad in the city, even worse in the suburbs. Here on this main route in a little satellite city, the bus stop was stagnant, no one had come for half an hour, maybe longer. Peering down the road, craning to spot an approaching bus, all you could see was a stretch of scenery, the upper swathe filled with commanding mountain ridges, rising and falling, which the yellow-green of Southern California’s steady, year-round climate, warm and dry, shimmered into the hazy blue of afternoon sky. Up on those hills, there were no houses yet, this valley being quite far from the city; and even among the trees, there were none of the little white houses that dot the hills in closer suburbs. There was only that high hill stretching up and out all in one color, a lightly yellow vegetation green, then the sky behind the hill, in a blue that wasn’t very blue. The Spaniards, when they’d first landed and looked at this empty mountain, had probably seen the very same thing. Read More
June 3, 2025 First Person A Return to the Frontier By Eileen Chang Photograph via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. When I got off the plane in Taipei on my way to Hong Kong, I did not expect to see anyone I knew. I had asked the Chus not to meet me, knowing they were busy just then. But it was possible that they would get somebody else to come in their stead, so I was not surprised when an efficient-looking man in neat Western clothes approached me. “You are Mrs. Richard Nixon?” he said in English. I had seen many photographs of the blond Mrs. Nixon and never imagined I resembled her. Besides, he should be able to tell a fellow Chinese even behind her dark glasses. But with a woman’s inability to disbelieve a compliment, no matter how flagrantly untrue, I remembered that she was thin, which I undoubtedly was. Then there were those glasses. “No, I am sorry,” I said, and he walked away to search among the other passengers. It struck me as a little odd that Mrs. Nixon should come to Formosa, even if everybody is visiting the Orient just now. Anyhow there must have been some mix-up, as there was only this one embassy employee to greet her. “Did you know Mrs. Nixon is coming today?” I asked my friends Mr. and Mrs. Chu, who had turned up after all. “No, we haven’t heard,” Mr. Chu said. I told them about the man who mistook me for her and what a joke that was. “Um,” he said unsmiling. Then he said somewhat embarrassedly, “There’s a man who is always hanging around the airport to meet American dignitaries. He’s not quite sane.” I laughed, then went under Formosa’s huge wave of wistful yearning for the outside world, particularly America, its only friend and therefore in some ways a foe. “How does it feel to be back?” Mr. Chu asked. Although I had never been there before, they were going along with the official assumption that Formosa is China, the mother country of all Chinese. I looked around the crowded airport and it really was China, not the strange one I left ten years ago under the Communists but the one I knew best and thought had vanished forever. The buzz of Mandarin voices also made it different from Hong Kong. A feeling of chronological confusion came over me. “It feels like dreaming.” And taking in all the familiar faces speaking the tones of homeland, I exclaimed, “But it’s not possible!” Mr. Chu smiled ruefully as if I had said, “But you are ghosts.” Read More
May 27, 2025 First Person The Stipend By Deb Olin Unferth Photograph by Jan Mellström, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC0 1.0. My new job came with a research stipend. I’d never had one before—a few grand that would renew each year for five years and then end. What could I use it for? “Anything,” I was told, which seemed remarkable, but as the months passed, it turned out to be harder to use the money than I thought. The rules were confusing, evolving. Every expense—a print cartridge, a pen, a meal with a student—required an array of online forms, approvals, files uploaded in special formats, and was a hassle for the beleaguered office administrator who wrote me careful, patient emails about my failures. Only books required a single, simple form. I soon understood that “anything” meant I could buy books. I can buy books. I’ve always been a person who buys books. I live in a city that has twelve independent bookstores within a short radius of my home. I began rotating between these stores, buying piles of books, and ordering them online too. I bought another bookcase, filled it, moved some furniture around, bought another. I know it’s the mark of an unstable mind to store more than one row of books on a bookshelf, so I stacked the second row horizontally, to achieve a causal, temporary effect. My husband wasn’t fooled but he rarely criticizes me, having his own demons he contends with every day and through the night in his sleep. He is aware that to love me means letting me proceed with whatever I believe I must do, which is one reason that, years ago, I divorced the other person I had married and married him. Read More