Positive Singles

Amber Riley has the type of laugh that sticks with you long after the raspy, rhythmic sounds have ceased. It punctuates her sentences sometimes, whether she's giving a chuckle to denote the serious nature of something she just said or throwing her head back in rip-roarious laughter after a joke. She laughs as if she understands the fragility of each minute. She chooses laughter often with the understanding that future joy is not guaranteed. Credit: Ally Green The sound of her laughter is rivaled only by her singing voice, an emblem of the past and the future resilience of Black women stretched over a few octaves. On Fox's Glee , her character Mercedes Jones was portrayed, perhaps unfairly, as the vocal duel to Rachel Berry (Lea Michele), offering rough, full-throated belts behind her co-star's smooth, pristine vocals. Riley's always been more than the singer who could deliver a finishing note, though. Portraying Effie White, she displayed the dynamic emotions of a song

Words with Friends The Santa Barbara Writers Conference Celebrates 50 Years of Finding and Refining Our Voices By Leslie Dinaberg | June 1, 2023 Grace Rachow | Ingrid Bostrom Writing can be hard, but it doesn't always have to be lonely. For those who yearn for a tribe of folks who care as much as they do about words and stories and getting their ideas out into the universe, the Santa Barbara Writers Conference (SBWC)  is an incredible place to connect with others who see the world through a storytelling lens. This summer marks the 50th anniversary of SBWC with a week-long event taking place June 18-23 at the Mar Monte Hotel across from East Beach. A true labor of love, the conference was founded in 1973 by Mary Conrad and her late husband, Barnaby Conrad, and was held at Cate School for the first few years. Mary Conrad remains a close advisor to SBWC and has been to every single Santa

A few months ago, sick with a cold on a Saturday morning, feeling miserable about the fact that I was stuck at home alone for the weekend, I checked Find My Friends. It's an app that comes standard on iPhones these days, the same one that tracks your phone or laptop or Airpods in case you lose them. But instead of devices, it shows the location of your friends, or rather, their phones. I tend to check Find My Friends when I want to see if anyone's nearby and might be up for a spontaneous hang, or else just to see their little bubbles in some kind of bizarre exercise in virtual closeness. But that morning I noticed one of my friends' bubbles wasn't where it usually was. It was miles away, in a neighborhood where neither of us knew anyone. She was, I assumed, at a random person's apartment where, we can go ahead and assume, she'd slept over the night before. It probably says a lot about me that my first thought was, "Good for her!" and not, "I

Listen to This Article Audio Recording by Audm For more audio journalism and storytelling, download New York Times Audio , a new iOS app available for news subscribers. One afternoon in 2020, early in the pandemic, I met Syl'violet and Matthew for a virtual session. Young, idealistic, deeply in love, they were also prone to dramatic fights. In this session Syl'violet, a vivacious essayist and spoken-word poet, was trying to describe the ways she felt Matthew, a measured medical student, was trying to control her, in this case by trying to dissuade her from buying a slushy. He thought they should keep to a tight budget until after he became a doctor and achieved financial stability. Then she could have "all the slushies you want later." Syl'violet found his reasoning maddening, especially since he seemed to imply she was reckless. On the face of it, the fight seemed insignificant, but then an exchange took place that changed the tenor of the argument, connecting u