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In our model, the café is not the antidote of the office, but its annex, a well-lit atelier for the young urban professional. A string of new concept spaces that have sprung up in Paris in the last several years, appropriately named Anticafé, make this explicit. They are living room retreats for di…

GIL SCOTT-HERON HAS a beautiful song I wish Ta-Nehisi Coates and all of us would listen to again. It’s called “Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?” The title is also the refrain, but the force of the rhetorical question lies in its pithy yoking of materialism and slave capitalism to a logic that t…

Let me be clear: Coates is not wrong to address the wealth gap. Far too few Americans understand the way black poverty has been systematically contoured and shaped by white power, by whites refusing black populations access to the levers of upward mobility that they then endlessly complain blacks f…

At the same time, I want to seize on the opening Coates has provided to suggest a different emphasis, one which ultimately comes down to thinking about reparations for racial injustice as a moral rather than a material debt, and one that must be repaid politically, not compensated for economically.…

Perhaps it’s worth reminding ourselves that when he was murdered, Fred Hampton was encouraging poor whites to analogize their position to that of poor blacks. At the time of his assassination, Malcolm X was embracing and actively seeking to incorporate a cross-racial coalition into his new organiza…