Louisiana's TOPS scholarship was supposed to send more poor and black students to college. So why do most of its recipients come from upper middle class backgrounds? I looked at it -- and other free-tuition programs -- for The Bayou Brief.
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Louisiana's TOPS scholarship was supposed to send more poor and black students to college. So why do most of its recipients come from upper middle class backgrounds? I looked at it -- and other free-tuition programs -- for The Bayou Brief.
1. Kendrick Lamar - DAMN.
The most-genius with a tight-loop of conscious bangers
2. sza - CTRL
I don’t think I went a day without listening to this album. She has so much rhythm and so much to say. Every lyric feels like the right one.
3. Lorde - Melodrama
The production, but especially the lyrics. “I am my mother's child, I'll love you 'til my breathing stops. I'll love you 'til you call the cops on me.”
4. Tyler the Creator - Flower Boy
The lyrics, but especially the production
5. Future - HNDRXX
The trap king gets loose
6. Makaya McCraven - Highly Rare
My favorite modern jazz innovator
7. Dirty Projectors - Dirty Projectors
I don’t love every song, but the good ones are so good, they blur out the rest.
8. Vince Staples - Big Fish Theory
Still my favorite rapper, veering left toward Detroit while everyone else co-opts the sounds of Atlanta
9. The xx - I See You
Still the best at driving emotions through minimalism
10. dvsn - Morning After
Sexy, jealousy-filled and way better than all the other dark R&B guys
11. Calvin Harris - Funk Wav Bounces, Vol. 1
Stupid fun
12. Ty Dolla $ign - Beach House 3
So many hooks
13. Migos - Culture
Irresistible tastemakers
14. Moses Sumney, Aromanticism
If Joanna Newsom and R&B merged. His voice is a wonder.
15. Jay-Z 4:44
Yes, write all the man-unfolded think pieces. Jay will forever have the best voice, but I’m here for NO ID.
16. Drake - More Life
If only Drake put out one album every other year, it’d be perfect. This one is no exception -- plenty of clutter, even more gems.
17. Big Sean - I Decided.
I don't even think the lyrics or production are necessarily great, but I just kept wanting to listen to this album.
18. Smino - blkswn
Rap from the era of Chance: Open-armed beats bolstered by such a good voice
19. Slowdive - Slowdive
The dream(y shoegaze) of the ‘90s is alive.
20. Majid Jordan - The Space Between
Vibes.
Honorable mentions: Aimless - Beats from 2017, A.Chal - On Gaz, Keyon Harrold - The Mugician, Nate Smith - Kinfolk, GoldLink - At What Cost, Perfume Genius - No Shape, A Boogie wit da Hoodie - The Bigger Artist, Young Thug & Future - Super Slimey, Mr. Eazi - Accra to Lagos
I'm reporting in Louisiana these days and so moved by the humidity and hospitality of it all. Spent a long weekend there in November, following around a woman hell-bent on giving everything. That Saturday, she and a group of boys cooked barbecue chicken plates to give out to Shreveport's homeless.
Time feels infinite and stretched, untethered to who I was before. I just stay locked to a desk, studying and reading and writing, hoping I am adding up to someone better.
New York stays so sunny. I'm perched outside reading 600 pages a week, tracing nation-state formation through LBJ's war on poverty. One weekend, we went to two different Jamaican bars. Scotch Bonnet hot forever.
Moved 3,000 miles east to a dark, weatherless apartment. It's lonely out in space. Spending my days reading and listening to African jazz.
Or listen on Apple Music.
My story about a Native American rapper ran on the front page of the Aug. 27 Sunday Oregonian. Here's an excerpt:
The scratch was the last straw.
Scott Kalama had been on a high. His rap album, "Rez Life," had just won the Native American Music Award for best music video. He'd come home to the Warm Springs Reservation driving a 2013 silver drop-top Camaro, a sign he'd made it in a community where pickups and sedans tended to be a decade old and caked in red dirt.
The rez, Kalama thought, had done him wrong all his life. He was 31 and had already buried three siblings. His dad was a drunk. Kalama had spent most of his life too broke to afford a fast food hamburger. He left for college and returned to find his business degree useless in a place too poor to support a new enterprise.
Still, Kalama had stayed. He launched his rap career there, even though the Central Oregon reservation lacked a professional recording studio or performance space. He did it all for the tribe, he thought. That national award was supposed to put Warm Springs on the map.
Then Kalama stepped outside on his lunch break and saw it. The scratch. Someone had keyed his driver-side door, leaving a seven-inch swoosh that turned his stomach.
This is how they repay me, he thought.
He went back to his office and took his frustrations out on Facebook: "I can't trust my own people," he wrote. "I'm moving."
To Portland, he thought, or maybe LA. A nonprofit wanted to hire him. An engineer who'd worked with Snoop Dogg and 2Pac agreed to help with his next record. Kalama, a stocky 5-foot-8 with a three-inch goatee and a braid down his back, was a unique artist, the engineer said.
His phone vibrated. A tribal council member had seen his post almost the moment he hit enter. Carina Miller typed a response:
"I know how you feel. But you can't leave," she told him. "We need you."
Read the rest on The Oregonian.
I spent the past three years following a transgender teenager as he came of age. The series launched last week on The Oregonian.
Jay was a teenager coming of age in an era Time magazine had declared the Transgender Tipping Point.
By his senior year, Jay's quiet life would ride a surge in civil rights.
Barack Obama would become the first president to say the word "transgender" in a State of the Union speech. Target would strip gender labels off its toy aisles. In Oregon, student-athletes would gain the right to decide whether to play on the girls' team or the boys'. Girls would wear tuxedos to prom.
That didn't make the path forward easy or safe. North Carolina would forfeit $3.7 billion to keep people like Jay out of the bathroom. An Oregon city councilman an hour from Jay's house would threaten an "ass-whooping" to transgender students who used "the opposite sex's facilities." Even Washington, the liberal state Jay called home, would consider a bill rolling back his right to choose the locker room that felt right. President Donald Trump would take over for Obama and ban transgender people from serving in the military.
But that morning, Jay was just a teenager, just a boy walking to school. He didn't want to be a trailblazer. He wanted to be normal.
Jay and I also went on Oregon Public Broadcasting's noontime show Think Out Loud to talk about the story. You can listen online or below.
My Portland days are winding down. Still, I have 11,000 words due by the end of the month. My brain loops crazy and happy and sad and nostalgic and anxious. Green lights only remind me how hard going is.
Or listen on Apple Music.
Every voice was a companion. Some mornings I called the time and temperature man a dozen times just to see if anything had changed. Most afternoons I called the school homework line, an answering machine service that allowed me to leave messages for my seventh grade teacher. I confessed that she was my favorite. I sang songs I had written for her. I told her my parents had separated or gotten back together and we were moving again. The TV was never not on. My best friend got a karaoke machine, and we locked it in echo mode. We stood on the toilet, ears angled to the ceiling to hear the muffled murmurs from the apartment above. Vampires, I deduced. Who else would shuffle all night? We traded the microphone, deejays of a show that never aired. We recorded all of 1996 that way, one voice behind the other. Even now I can’t stand quiet. I wake up to the radio, to the cats meowing as you mumble a sleepy good morning. You fall back into silence, but I carry the public radio voice of the world in my work pants pocket. The answering machines don't exist anymore, but I can hear them -- the time, the temperature, my seventh grade teacher's "hello" -- the soundtracks that carried me from there to here, echoing still.
Started saying goodbye way too early. Honey I'll come get my things, but I can't let go.
Or listen on Apple Music.
March music, crossing the country twice. Boston was Big Sean and both the Future albums. By the time I reached Miami, Drake's dance hall versions were the perfect backing sounds.
Or listen on Apple Music.
For years, Chanpone Sinlapasai avoided the airport. Then President Donald Trump temporarily banned refugees, and Sinlapasai's life changed.
Read moreThe short film I produced and co-directed is now online. Aubree Bernier-Clarke and I filmed "The Ballad of Little Pam" in Delhi, Louisiana. The short has played in film festivals in New Orleans, Jackson, Miss. and Sydney, Australia.
When her mother falls ill, Pam Sykes returns to rural Louisiana to care for the woman who kicked her out 40 years ago. They coexist, as long as Pam follows one, now unspoken rule: She can't date women. When Pam's mom starts dating a new man, Pam decides to see what's out there, too.
At the restaurant El Sarandeado, where breakfast is served with a side of free shrimp ceviche, Ramon Ramirez was sly with his movement-building. Between ordering huevos rancheros and coffee, he persuaded the waitress to post signs advertising a 1-800 number people can call if they see an ICE raid in progress.
He pointed across the street as he asked for Splenda. ICE had raided that corner, he told the waitress. Two men were waiting in front of a convenience store for a van to take them to work. Federal agents picked them up before the van did.
The waitress, an hour into a 12-hour shift, left with a flier and returned with six packets of Splenda.
Or listen on Apple Music.
Sahara Abdullahi could stay with her son in a refugee camp. Or the Somali mom could sacrifice her time with him as a baby to secure his future.
Read more