Music stars and activists alike have exploited Black death and protest imagery for profit — Update 6/7/22: Level has a new home. You can read this article and other new articles by visiting LEVELMAN.com. A James Baldwin quote plays. Two White male police officers confront and question a Black man sleeping in his car, quickly pinning him to the ground. The man (played by actor…

Forget the playoff race; this is the only power ranking that matters — Update 6/7/22: Level has a new home. You can read this article and other new articles by visiting LEVELMAN.com. Last July, the NBA set up shop in Orlando to close out the 2019–2020 season in an isolated zone at Walt Disney World. Within that bubble, the 22 teams competing for…

Japanese composer Hiroshi Yoshimura’s GREEN revealed I was losing sight while dreaming. I first encountered Hiroshi Yoshimura’s ambient yet purposeful record, GREEN, in January as a potential sleep aid for my infant daughter, Leone. Born into a pandemic, her short life knows only sequestration. The natural world has been closed…

Life changes hit the rapper hard — and shows like ‘Tokyo Ghoul’ helped him process it all — Update 6/7/22: Level has a new home. You can read this article and other new articles by visiting LEVELMAN.com. Since the ’90s, with Toonami curating anime for TV audiences and classics like Fist of the North Star circulating on VHS, Black America has been enamored with the Japanese medium. Just…

As he heads towards his thirties, the electrifying actor is laying himself bare — and finding a new sense of balance — Update 6/7/22: Level has a new home. You can read this article and other new articles by visiting LEVELMAN.com. For nearly a decade, LaKeith Stanfield has used his screen time reveling in the bizarreness of America’s racial consciousness. Whether Atlanta’s quippy street mystic Darius, or the code-switching sardonics of Cassius…

Thought you’d watched everything out there? Time to broaden your horizons. — Update 6/7/22: Level has a new home. You can read this article and other new articles by visiting LEVELMAN.com. Bet you didn’t know streaming platforms had a bottom. Not a quality bottom, like the social media muck where White supremacists and Tory Lanez apologists congregate, but an actual bottom. Like…

A year later, it’s time to contend with the man’s whole self — his growth and wrongs in equal measure — Update 6/7/22: Level has a new home. You can read this article and other new articles by visiting LEVELMAN.com. A year after Kobe and Gianna Bryant’s sudden death, it still feels like an open wound. Some people are able to remember exactly where they were when they heard the news…

The newest Netflix obsession, Bridgerton, comes from TV’s peak pound-for-pound provocateur, Shonda Rhimes. And just like Shondaland productions Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, and How to Get Away With Murder, Bridgerton’s propulsive dalliance with the messy underpinnings of society have all but endeared fans across the globe. But just because it addresses…

Netflix’s newest bingeable heist series plays with race, but insists on doing so in a lily-white version of Paris. — Update 6/7/22: Level has a new home. You can read this article and other new articles by visiting LEVELMAN.com. In Lupin, Netflix’s new French heist series, the first score takes place below the Louvre. Having joined the building’s janitorial crew weeks before, Assane Diop (Omar Sy) ascends into the opulent…