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1.8.2021, No. 36
“Snowwwww! 2021 is the best year ever.” — Emilia, my seven-year-old
“The whole world looks like a beautiful wedding!” — Miles, my
four-year-old
FIVE.
1.
Breonna Taylor was 26. Our latest issue, on newsstands now, features 26 Black women in their mid-20s, talking about everything from motherhood to protesting, gun ownership to Afrofuturism, Netflix to being the boss — and aspirations for life beyond 26. And each has her own cover.
This morning at the office, while seeing all 26 together for the first time, I thought of this quote from Dazia Karey (a portion of which is on the spine of each edition):
“What gives me hope?” (Big sigh.) “The fact that my generation is now the one that’s going to transform — we’re taking over the world, basically. This is our time to show what we can do. They always say, ‘You guys are the future.’ Well, now is the future. And it gives me hope to know that the people I can relate to, my age group, my generation, we are the ones who are now about to have control.”
2. On Wednesday night, while watching the U.S. Capitol do its best impression of being under siege by the British in 1814, my mind went to Kentucky U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell, who has been Majority Leader since 2015 (and is about to become Minority Leader in his seventh term after Republicans lost two runoff elections in Georgia). While the Capitol, as my friend put it, started to resemble a scene out of The Dark Knight Rises, I re-read “How Mitch McConnell Became Trump’s Enabler-In-Chief,” which ran in the New Yorker last spring. From the piece:
“Some critics argue that McConnell bears a singular responsibility for the country’s predicament. They say that he knew from the start that Trump was unequipped to lead in a crisis, but, because the President was beloved by the Republican base, McConnell protected him.”
“Demagogues like Trump, if they can get elected, can’t really govern unless they have people like McConnell.”
“McConnell has been the most powerful force normalizing Trump in Washington.”
“Mitch is kidding himself if he thinks he’ll be remembered for anything other than Trump. He will be remembered as the Trump facilitator.”
In 2009, for a Louisville Magazine piece about McConnell preparing for Obama’s first term, fellow Louisvillian and U.S. Rep. John Yarmuth said, “Mitch gets up every day and has for the last, I don’t know how many years — probably 50 years of his life — saying, ‘What can I do today to advance my political interests?’”
3. This week, the C-J announced the closure of its Louisville printing presses and packaging facility (that’s 102 jobs), and last month editor Rick Green stepped down, after leading the paper to a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of Gov. Matt Bevin’s controversial pardons. He told Business First something I’d been thinking about a lot, for both the C-J and local journalism in general: “We’re in a golden age of storytelling where we can touch an unprecedented number of readers, viewers and listeners in new ways — we just have to unlock the sustainable business model for it.”
4. For the new issue, Josh Wood interviewed current and former LMPD officers about what it means to be a Black cop. He wrote, “Despite reforms, the events of (2020) have ‘shattered’ the relationship between LMPD and a community that was already distrustful of the organization, says Cherie Dawson-Edwards, the associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion at the University of Louisville. ‘And you can’t rebuild shattered glass,’ she says. ‘You have to do something else. You have to do something different.’”
The story went to the printer before Mayor Fischer announced the controversial hire of Erika Shields as the new LMPD chief. Shields — who retired as Atlanta’s chief after an officer shot and killed a 27-year-old Black man named Rayshard Brooks in a Wendy’s parking lot — said in a statement, “I recognize that there is a lot of healing that needs to happen in policing in general, and that LMPD is at a crossroads. But I think there is also an opportunity to get this right here in Louisville, and to create a model for other cities to follow.”
In his C-J column, Joe Gerth wrote, “Atlanta couldn’t move forward with Shields at the helm…And after what we’ve been through as a community over the last 10 months, it’s hard to imagine Louisville will be able to move forward with her in charge.”
5. So you don’t have to: I watched the series premiere of Call Me Kat, the new FOX comedy about a single woman named Kat, who opens a…cat cafe in Louisville. According to the show, set but not filmed here, the Brown Hotel and its Crystal Ballroom (a Burbank soundstage) is where “Elizabeth Taylor lost an emerald out of her peacock broach.” And I couldn’t believe it: The characters say Lou-a-vuhl.
One of the writers, Darlene Hunt, who was born in Shively, told WDRB, “I will say the pronunciation of Louisville is a constant on our set. We will say: ‘Do that again. Louisville, Louisville, Louisville.’ We have a dialogue coach to work with everyone to say that properly.”
Sorry, FOX. You can make your jokes about GettinLuckyInKentucky.com, but we bought Louavuhl.com last year.
OH!
A little something from the LouMag archive.
WFPL’s Amina Elahi had a story about Christopher 2X, the anti-violence activist who was (non-controversially) pardoned by President Trump in December, removing “decades-old, non-violent cocaine charges from his record, where they remained after he served nine years in prison.” In another FPL piece, about the record number of homicides the city saw in 2020, 2X said, “These kids, the same way they can navigate a cell phone at two years old…equally they absorb what’s going on around them with all this violence. You can start to see the tell-tale signs of some of the troubling issues behavioral wise with kids and early-childhood development.”
In 2005, Louisville Magazine published a profile of 2X, born Christopher Bryant in 1960. In the opening, Joe Atkinson wrote, “It’s a warm August night in the Sheppard Square housing project, and more than 250 people are gathered to remember one of their own. Many are flocked around Building 28, where blood — still wet — pools in the grass.
“As Louisville’s homicide rate continues to rise, 2X’s phone continues to ring.”
2X said, “When something goes down, somebody will call me and say, ‘Chris, somebody got killed here.’ We want to say that we’re not going to tolerate violence; that’s not what our community is.”
TOO…
Bri came home early this morning with something I had somehow never tried from Blue Dog Bakery: a cone of what looked like churros but were actually salty-sugary-crispy-sometimes-crunchy “frittes,” made from kouign-amann pastry trimmings. Emilia said, “I take a bite and close my eyes and can’t stop.”
👏…👏 …👏👏…👏👏👏…👏 👏👏👏👏👏👏
Josh Moss
editor, Louisville Magazine
jmoss@loumag.com
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