“I sometimes had to cave inside of myself and try to stamp out the rage at a white logic about the black body that had infected the entire world.”
— In An America On Fire, Baldwin's Legacy Led Me to Paris, Catapult

CATAPULT STORY, DECEMBER 2019: “In an America on Fire, Baldwin’s Legacy Led Me to Paris”

Baldwin’s mental health was complicated not simply by his blackness, but also his queerness. Baldwin did not even feel at home in the term “gay,” which may be why he spoke at various points in his life about romantic relationships with women as well. Aside from being excluded from the March on Washington, the rejection of his sexuality by black activists and creatives must have hardened him.

COMMUNE MAGAZINE, MARCH 2019: “WE END UP IN DISASTER”

On June 4, 1879, the first long-distance oil pipeline, built by the Tide-Water Pipe Company, was tested before a large crowd in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. From that moment on, America became a nation obsessed with the extraction of oil. The country’s rise to dominance in the twentieth century was due in no small part to its ready access to the chief energy source for the technology of the era. Today, the US is once again the leading producer of oil, thanks to new technologies that enable extraction from places like the Bakken Plateau in North Dakota and the Permian basin in West Texas. These technologies pull millions of barrels out of fields once thought exhausted and move it cheaply, through pipelines, to coastal refineries.