Y'all, I have to tell you something terrible, because I cannot hold it in my heart alone. So, Henry Choate, the kid they lynched at the Maury County courthouse? He was accused of assaulting a white girl name Sarah Harlan. They tracked him to his grandfather's house and grabbed him and asked Sarah if she could identify him as her attacker. She could not. Her mother begged the crowd to let the justice system work. That's all terrible. But, y'all, his grandfather's name was Henry Harlan.

The first important thing to realize is that they won. They got in the Capitol, ran amok for an afternoon, took selfies and live-streamed their conquest and, after the President told them he loved them, they left. Nothing we can do now changes the fact that they won yesterday. And we cannot effectively understand or deal with them if we don’t see this as their victory.

The tentative explanation for what’s happening with my neck is that, basically, the scaffolding that moves your thyroid into place is supposed to get reabsorbed by your body before you’re born. Mine was not. These past few days are it deciding to make something of itself. Even as a fetus, I did a halfassed job of picking up after myself!

I can't decide if this is hyperbole or not, but the ways that whole swaths of black history in Nashville have been erased feels like ethnic cleansing. Today I went and saw a whole side of a hill that had been one of the largest black cemeteries in Davidson County. It's gone. Not just the cemetery. The whole side of the hill the cemetery sat on. Six thousand people marched from East Nashville to that spot in 1872 and dedicated that cemetery. It was filled with babies and grandparents and loved ones.

If the lore about what makes a place haunted is to be trusted, I think I've identified what should be the most haunted spot in Nashville--Brick Church Pike between Trinity and Ewing. For starters, you've got a desecrated cemetery (more on that at some future date). And then! Just north of there, you have J.B. Ferguson's spiritualist utopia (thought how much of a utopia he was able to create remains unknown to me). Ferguson is my second favorite Nashville spiritualist (after Ben Allen).

I think a problem universities are going to have with rape culture in their athletic programs is that you're telling young men to ignore their own pain, to do things they don't want to do, and you're telling them they wanted this. And then we act all deeply hurt when they treat women that way. For me, the most horrifying thing, and the thing I wish we could actually talk about, is the possibility that dude thought that was consensual. That he could hurt a girl so bad she had to go to the hospital and he thought everything was cool.

I’m not sure why this is so hard for people to understand, but the only way we have of stopping Covid19 at the moment is to deprive it of hosts. If it doesn’t have uninflected people to jump to, it can’t spread. Since we can’t visually tell who all the infected people are and we don’t have enough testing to determine who all is infected, they only certain way we have of depriving it of hosts is for everyone to stay away from each other.

No, it was put up in 1978, under conditions that are deeply fucked up. Lois DeBerry, the first black woman to serve in the Tennessee General Assembly, was elected in 1972 and took office when the Assembly convened in 1973. That very session,

https://twitter.com/brotherjones_/status/1150760627050352641

Doug Henry sponsored a resolution to install the bust and on April 13, 1973, it passed. The thing about Doug Henry is that everyone knows he was brilliant and an astute scholar of history. So, the idea that the timing didn't have anything to do with DeBerry or with all the racist

The problem as I see it is that the cherry trees are emblematic of a lot of what is making Nashville unhappy. Over and over, we’re supposed to give up things we can enjoy for free so that we can have the “economic impact” of whatever necessitates the destruction of the free things. Give up a park because a skyscraper has such a good “economic impact.” Give up another park and a lost graveyard for “economic impact.” Pay for a water park you can’t use unless you pay a private entity for the privilege because of the “economic impact.”

Early this morning, 58 years ago, the house of Z. Alexander Looby blew up. He and his wife were asleep in the bedroom. He thought the house had been hit by lightning. His neighbor's house had an enormous hole in it. The windows on the apartment building next door were blown out. Windows at Meherry across the street were blown out and people injured from the flying glass. After a year of research, here's what I know, as in actual fact: Two days after the bombing, the police had a confession. They dismissed it, but media reports aren't clear on why.