People, Places & Things Vol. 3

Thank you to everyone who read and shared last week’s essay on my complicated relationship with my newfound ADHD diagnosis and prescription medication. I hold the sincere belief that the more honestly we talk about our lives, the more we realize we’re not navigating them alone. Like I said in the essay, part of me feels like if everybody has ADHD, then maybe nobody has ADHD and what we’re describing is just a perfectly ordinary part of being human.

Where My ADHD Baddies At?

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Jul 16

I was recently diagnosed with ADHD at the age of 33. Apparently I was the last person to find out and this was breaking news to no one besides me. One or two of my loved ones looked at me incredulously and said, “No shit. You? Mister ‘I want to do everything all at the same time and somehow they’re all priorities?’”

I read your emails, comments, and stories, and I’m grateful so many of you trusted me enough to share your own. Now, onto this week’s dispatch of people, places, and things.

According to a recent lawsuit, Boosie Badazz paid 600,000 buckaroos hoping to secure a presidential pardon from Donald Trump and got left holding the bag when nothing materialized. That’s a lot of bread to throw at two Republican operatives who sold you a pipe dream, and the man is understandably livid to get nothing for his efforts.

The funniest part, though, has been watching Republicans rush to distance themselves from the story as though buying access to presidential clemency is some wild conspiracy theory. Excuse me, but since when? Boosie wasn’t all the way wrong in believing that this option was available: we all saw the rappers who got pardons during Trump ‘s first administration, from Wayne to Kodak Black. Pardons exist in a political gray market where influence, wealth, and connections matter a whole lot more than justice. I’m just shocked someone said the quiet part out loud, even if it looks like this is all going to blow up in his face.

Money might not buy you class, but it can definitely buy you “justice.” In fact, we’ve become so accustomed to transactional politics that we’re mainly surprised if the bribe falls through. The thing is, corruption feels very different when you’re the sucker instead of the beneficiary, and Boosie found out way too late he was the former.

Argentina losing the World Cup final after spending the entire tournament behaving like the neighborhood bully was objectively hilarious. They were shoving people around like it was a WWE cagefight only to still lose 1-0 in extra time. Messi is still one of the greatest soccer players to ever do it, but I’m claiming Lamine Yamal and Spain’s victory as a win for Al-Andalus and therefore Africa by default.

The loss was especially satisfying because Argentina’s aggression on the pitch has increasingly mirrored the ugliness surrounding the team off it. I know what you’re about to say: Vic, what country isn’t anti-Black? This is absolutely true, and I think only a fool would sit up here and pretend that a European country has moral authority over anyone. But national football gives countries ninety minutes to perform the stories they already tell themselves, and the one Argentina told was pretty damning, from the racist chants to general hostile play.

Then there’s the politics surrounding the team itself. Argentina’s Prime Minister Javier Milei has made support for war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel very prominent, with Bibi and crew openly rooting for an Argentinian win. At that point, the vibes were already cursed.

Argentina loves to act like the European nation of Latin America, as if it magically culturally detached from the continent around it. That identity didn’t fall from the sky: we’ve all heard the stats around the aggressive blanqueamiento and erasure that crippled Argentina’s Black and indigenous population; they even voted against reparations. While none of that is Lionel Messi’s responsibility, football has never existed outside politics. Until next time, Argentina!

Has anybody else completely lost track of what “normal weather” is supposed to look like? One week the Northeast is baking under triple-digit heat, the next my overheated phone’s going off with tornado warnings. Canada has been smoking out half the East Coast with wildfire haze to the point it’s become a diplomatic issue. Every week there’s another once in a lifetime flood — I feel like every week I scroll through Instagram I see New Yorkers doing parkour trying to keep their clothes dry.

At some point you have to start asking yourself whether crazy is just the new baseline. I’ve been thinking about something the Sudanese scholar Bedour Alagraa calls the interminable catastrophe. The basic idea is that the catastrophic impact of climate change isn’t some isolated event waiting for us in the future. There’s no Day After Tomorrow style cataclysmic event coming and Jake Gyllenhaal certainly isn’t going to save us. Instead, we are barreling towards a permanent crisis that we will have to fight as an ongoing condition.

That’s why climate conversations so often feel incomplete to me. Black folks in Flint, Jackson, New Orleans after Katrina, and so many other places in America and the global south have been living versions of climate injustice long before the phrase became fashionable. All thats changing is that the people who once thought they were insulated from these impacts are quickly realizing they aren’t. Climate change is here y’all, its not some far off concept in the future, and we need to recognize it as another front in the struggle against colonialism and capitalism.

That’s all for this week. As always, let me know what you think in the comments.