He would have been my first, I suppose—a Korean student at some other school in Beijing's Wudaokou university district.

I am an honor student, turned gun shot victim, turned gun carrier/college student, turned a person who almost shot a neighbor's mother because her son "disrespected me" on my block. I did not pull the trigger, thanks to the words of a friend who would have supplied me the gun, but one year later I participated in an equally reprehensible act that included a gun and death.

Howard Beach/JFK, A

Looking back at photos is a dangerous game. Nostalgia can be a caustic drug, particularly when loss is involved. Here in the New York winter, those August days in the South feel impossible, unreal, until a picture brings it all back, all of it, the good and the bad, and there were plenty of both.

If you walk down the avenue fast enough, you might think that today is an ordinary Easter Sunday, filled with joyous laughter and terrible church music. But if you are an observant individual who enjoys slow strides along the Brooklyn promenade, you may hear my friend Dolores's shrieks coming from the blue-fenced yellow house on the corner.

My father — an old lion of a man — would bark, "They don't give a fuck about you," any time I called a rapper, athlete or actor a "beast" for their artistic or athletic feats.

The following is a True Stories conversation between Kameelah Janan Rasheed and Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah.

I'm not a doctor but I'm an expert. In the locker room, guys exchange a wealth of age-old wisdom. A couple of times, I reset broken noses. Usually my own, but once my friend Gabriel was in bed with my friend Josephine and accidentally kneed her, and I reset her broken nose. She's still complaining, but it would have worked if she'd kept the tape on.

The other Sunday, my oldest brother, Ben, came to Fort Greene from Manhattan. It's our every-other-week ritual.

May 19 marks the 89th birthday of Malcolm X. In this essay, Edward Pittman reflects on how Malcolm X influenced his search for black identity and love during the late 1970s. This essay is excerpted from Pittman's memoir, Home Before Dark.

I grew up with a killer. My father. He didn't kill in a way that would ever send him to jail. He wasn't in the military. Instead, he used the death penalty. Sometimes he called and gave the order for inmates to be executed.

I'm walking home after I fucked this guy who writes self-loathing poetry and has Yellow Fever, which is ridiculous because nobody walks in LA. Home is currently in Silver Lake, a neighborhood where there's a lot of new job openings for a position called Being Pretty and Prancing Around the Sidewalk. I make the walk halfway in my heels down Sunset Boulevard, in a dress that's debatably a shirt, and decide to haul-ass barefoot down the burning cement sidewalk. It might not be super-mentally healthy for me to be shapely, brown, average height, and live among tall, anorexic blondes so I can stare at them. But even if I don't fit in, I like being part of it. Sometimes I look around and it seems as if the Holocaust were successful or something.

I thought I'd never see my cult leader again.

On January 24, 2009, my college classmate Julian was killed in a roadside bomb blast in Afghanistan. He was twenty-five years old, and his was the first combat death in Afghanistan during the Obama presidency. His death was also the first I learned of from a Facebook wall.

There are three things you should know.

When the police found me I was standing on a subway platform, somewhere in Brooklyn, barefoot, wearing only soccer shorts in October, and crying. My hands were folded behind my head like a captured soldier. For the previous 12 hours I had wandered the streets of New York, convinced that I was being videotaped, Truman Show-style, by hidden cameras. I made my living as a public defender in Brooklyn, but I did standup at night. I'd recently met with a network executive to discuss a pilot for a reality show based on my act; now I thought the city was my set.

Ta-Nehisi Coates of the Atlantic and Jonathan Chait of New York have, over the past week, been engaged in something equal parts duel and duet in the pixels of their respective magazine's websites. Their debate has plumbed the depths of race and racism in America, working out the questions of civic and historical responsibility in a public forum with respect and grace. As readers and citizens we are privileged to bear witness to this dialogue. They've also thrown some damn good shade at each other, so let's look at that.

Earlier this month, two young, beautiful Black women, Britney Cosby and Crystal Jackson, were left dead by a dumpster in Texas*. Their apparent crime? Being in a romantic love that by all friends' accounts was sweet and wonderful. Their apparent murderer? The father of one of the women didn't like her sexual orientation, her relationship, or her girlfriend, and he killed them both, leaving them to rot like garbage.

“Is this Matt the Hat?” A pet-name from my childhood.

The New York Times had yet another of its delightful "Room for Debate" sessions, in which various experts throw quick-take opinions on a subject past one another. The subject: Was the College Board right to have decided to make the essay portion of future SAT tests optional? Or, more broadly, "Can Writing Be Assessed?" Although Gawker was not specifically invited to participate, below is our contribution to the conversation.