On Sunday afternoon, I was at "the Do Over", an annual event in Brooklyn, N.Y., which was attended by thousands of people, mostly young black professionals looking for a good time.
In the crowd, I spotted a woman who left no doubt about why she’d shown up that day—not for the music or to hang with her girls or stunt for the Gram. She was looking for a man. How did I know?
She was wearing a sign on her back that read, “I just came here to find a husband.”
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I’m not sure how I picked up the hobby of touring plantations. I think it started with my interest in architecture—picked up from my husband, who works in real estate—and my best friend of 20-plus years, who is an interior designer. Over the years, I’ve adopted their combined interests.
I’ve been to four plantations and an antebellum home with slave quarters over the past few months. That certainly doesn’t make me an expert on slavery or plantations. But it has given me some perspective on the popular article “I Used to Lead Tours at a Plantation. You Won’t Believe the Questions I Got About Slavery,” written by Margaret Biser for Vox.
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People hold candles alongside wooden crosses at Freedom-Corner in Uhuru Park in Nairobi, Kenya, April 7, 2015, during a vigil for the victims of an attack claimed by Somalia’s al-Qaida-linked al-Shabab insurgents at Garissa University College, in which 148 people were killed.
TONY KARUMBA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
I knew maybe three things about Kenya when my plane landed in Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in late February: The traffic was awful in Nairobi; it was a “party city,” with the good times rolling as late—or, er, as early—as 9 a.m.; and in 2013, the city’s most upscale mall, Westgate, suffered a four-day siege by the Somali Islamist terrorist group al-Shabab. It’s the same group that attacked Kenya’s Garissa University College on Good Friday, killing 148 people.
Of the few things I knew, I knew the most about the mall tragedy. One Saturday afternoon when I had somewhere to be, I sat glued to HBO watching Terror at the Mall, a documentary about the siege.
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