How does one recuperate lives entangled with and impossible to differentiate from the terrible utterances that condemned them to death, the account books that identified them as units of value, the invoices that claimed them as property, and the banal chronicles that stripped them of human features? — Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts” In her now classic article, “Venus in Two Acts,” Dr. Saidiya Hartman sets out the dilemmas that slavery researchers confront, especially those of us who place enslaved people at the center of our inquiries.

Hi. You are reading Understanding TikTok. My name is Marcus. My For You Page these days is “power gay” Daniel-Ryan Spaulding getting Botox, Kathleen Hanna singing on a fitness bike, Madeline Argy’s accent, Hannah Diamond promoting her new single, Michael Motamedi eating tin fish in Spain, Glaive wearing Lemaire Black Piped Loafers to the sound of DJ Hearstring’s Boiler Room. How is your summer going?  Here is your last TikTok update before a little vacation en France…

In the late 1990s, a group of distinguished investment bankers and economists, including Nobel laureates, founded Long-Term Capital Management, a hedge fund that espoused a revolutionary investment approach based on complex mathematical models based on identifying and exploiting pricing discrepancies between related financial instruments. The fund's managers believed that these spreads would eventually converge, allowing the fund to generate significant profits. However, their hubris ultimately led to their downfall, as the fund's spectacular collapse in 1998 highlighted the limitations of even the most sophisticated financial models when faced with the unpredictability of human nature.

I’ve been reading folk horror stories—old ways of explaining reality with mythology instead of science. In the old stories, the Fae embody wild, dangerous energies, but also (oddly, and obviously magically) are endearingly powerful. And honestly, we’ve all encountered fae in places like writing groups, deciduous forests, at spelling bees, on public transportation, and in our minds when we read those fairy tales. 1 Fae have “hard to stop” energy.

If you’re a man, you have internalized sexist values. That’s especially true if you think you haven’t. In fact, the more adamant you are that you’re not sexist, the less time you spend reflecting on your own choices and behavior. And that means the more likely you are to behave in reflexive, unthinking, sexist ways. These tips are not necessarily the only ways to be less sexist, or even the most important.