by Mark Slutsky

First of all, I just want to thank everyone for writing in with all their amazing questions and comments. The reaction to my last post has been totally overwhelming! I’m delighted, and more than a little humbled.

When I first sat down to start working on the crazy, sprawling, life-consuming project would eventually become Salamerta, I would never have guessed the extent to which it would eventually take over my life — let alone what it might mean to anyone else. So thank you, and while I obviously can’t answer everyone’s questions, I’m going to try to respond to as many as I can.

Let’s dive right in. Many of you wanted to know more about the origins of Salamerta, and how and why I created it in the first place.

It truly has been a labor of love; I’ve spent over two years obsessing over it, staying up way into the night fiddling with every little geographical and cultural detail. But that said, Salamerta did originally begin as a job for hire. A couple of years ago, a video game developer hired me to create a world for a free-to-play mobile puzzle game. I’d put about three solid months of work into the map when the developer was acquired by another company and the project killed.

To make matters worse (and to get a little awkwardly personal here) my marriage, at the time, was pretty much on the rocks. My husband and I actually separated the day after I got the news. I found myself with not much to do and a rather strong desire to escape the “real” world. Almost out of habit, I kept tinkering with my little creation.

You wouldn’t recognize Salamerta at that embryonic stage — no Jarascal! No silver fleet! — but something kept drawing me back to it. Free from the developer’s constraints and endless notes, I could play, actually play, and pour my own personality and pre-occupations into the world. It was weirdly therapeutic to watch my software algorithms combine the base elements I feed into them, add a little spin of randomness, and spit out elements of what feels like a living, breathing universe.

I’ve never been great at drawing, but I’m an artist when it comes to choosing just the right details. I could toss some carefully handpicked features — “rocky fjords,” “coniferous vegetation,” “large predator bird population” — into my software and boom, out came an uncannily realistic and detailed coastline — specifically, in that case, the Sukari coast.

You asked about place names. I thought a lot about the “feel” I wanted them all to have. I had this idea that the world should be vaguely Mediterranean in nature (inspired, I think, by a book I was reading at the time, Jan Morris’s Last Letters From Hav, which is one of my favorite examples of an invented nation), so I experimented by seeding the name generator with huge databases of Italianate, Greek and even Romanian atlas data. Nothing quite felt right until I stumbled upon a map of Indonesia. Something about the sort-of-European, sort-of-Asian vibe of the names just clicked with me, so I scraped them and loaded them into the name generator. That’s why you have the great capital of Cilija, the Bedeng mountain range, and Lake Abasana. And when it spat out “Salamerta,” I instantly knew it would be perfect for
the world itself.

Some of my whims had unintended consequences. Since I have a rather inordinate love for the color pink, I thought it would be fun if Salamerta’s geologic formations were heavily striated with Rhodochrosite, a gorgeous rosey-hued mineral formation. I added a lot of it to the mix when generating the world’s base landforms, but what I hadn’t thought of was how Rhodochrosite most often appears in hydrothermal veins associated with minerals such as — you probably guessed it — silver. So as a side consequence of me studding Salamerta with lovely pink crystals, there’s also countless veins of silver. And of course, this led the population to dig for that shiny precious metal, and for Salamerta’s economy to lean heavily on silver production.

It’s no surprise that the Djatii, the world’s most common currency, is a silver coin, nor that Salamerta’s artisans and engravers have created such stunning, intricate works in the metal. But at the same time, silver mines are not exactly the healthiest places to spend your life working, and their environmental impact can be quite profound. I’m thinking of the Astanan forests, a feature which I was really quite proud of, which were heavily logged when a seam was found nearby, its rivers and lakes later polluted with toxic tailings. If I’d had any idea, I probably would have generated the forest somewhere else completely! So my love of the color pink indirectly made Salamerta all the richer, economically and artistically, but at the same time also led to a great deal of suffering and at least one war over the resource.

At one point I realized I could go even further, and stitch some of my favorite shapes and designs deep into the fabric of the universe I was creating. I’ve always been fond of the hamsa, an ancient ward against the evil eye, which appears as the image of a hand with an eye in its palm, so I seeded the “ingredients” for it into deep into Salamerta’s physics engine, so it would naturally occur throughout the world.

Look close and you can see it on every level, from the micro to the macro. The lomita, a tiny sea crustacean found off the shores of Karah, the constellation of Cipatat, and the hills of Minda all share the same basic contours, and I’m sure there are plenty of more examples I haven’t yet come across.

At first I worried this was going to feel kind of artificial and on-the-nose, but when you think about it, it’s actually quite realistic. Throughout the greater universe, the spiral form is just as prevalent as my hamsa, found everywhere from tiny snail shells to unimaginably large galaxies.

I had some ideas of the kind of a society I wanted Salamerta to have, but executing them was a little more complicated than I had first imagined. I have always been fascinated by the Vienna of the late 19th/early 20th Centuries — a sophisticated imperial capital, where writers and playwrights thronged wintry coffee houses and had wonderful, melancholy love affairs. So I turned the “café” slider way up (yes, I built in a café slider), and fiddled with the base dimensions of the café model itself, until most of them turned out big, picture-windowed, high-ceilinged and smoky, just like the way I remembered the Cafés Sprückel, Central, and Schwarzenberg from when I backpacked through the city one summer during university.

This little detail had quite a few unintended effects: it altered the political climate of Cilija, making it prone to radical groups and breakout political movements, who clustered in the coffee houses’ back rooms to plot their revolts and coups.

Things eventually got so out of hand I had to program in a Political Unrest slider and keep it somewhere in the middle, or otherwise I’d end up wasting too much of my time rebuilding. But if you ever wondered why there seems to be a minor revolution every decade or so, it’s basically just because I really liked Vienna’s cafés! I’m glad that so many of you seem to enjoy them as well.

It’s also why Jarascal exists at all. Originally I had no plans to generate a second, southern continent. But I realized for Salamerta to have a self-sufficient, semi-sustainable economy that its goods would have to come from somewhere. (I never liked the idea of just “airdropping” them as needed onto the map somewhere — it felt like cheating.)

What I’m trying to say is that all the coffee that was going to be consumed in Cilija’s coffee houses had to come from somewhere, and there was nowhere on the continent of Salamerta proper that had the proper climate. So what began as a small island to the continent’s south quickly grew into a large land mass of its own. I fed Colombian place names into my software: hence Jarascal, but also the capital of Pojita, the verdant hills of Aguates, the mighty river Lula. As with the silver trade, I wasn’t entirely happy with the quality-of-life impact, particularly among the population that actually farmed the coffee beans and sold them to the often-greedy Bovasendan brokers (setting the greed levels any lower and they never ended up importing enough), but at least I had my cafés.

I kept sprinkling in new details here and there, often just on a whim. You asked about superstitions. Ever wonder why Cilijans never go out in groups of seven? Why babies aren’t allowed to hear the hum of a beehive before their naming-day? Those were all just combinations my superstition algorithm spat out, but I really liked them. (The cool part is that they’re actually real! So don’t eat a rabbit’s leg in front of a widow any time soon, haha.)

The more I added, the more the various elements of the world interacted with each other, and the more lifelike and organic Salamerta and its inhabitants began to seem. It started to feel like there was a really society there, one I could step back from and just let run on its own.

And then there was the question of language. I toyed with the idea of creating my own bespoke lingua franca for Salamerta — god knows there are enough software tools floating around to make it a relatively simple task. But in the end I decided to stick with plain old English, my mother tongue. It was ultimately a practical decision, and one I’m glad I made.

Because now I can understand what you guys are saying.

I can communicate with you; I can read your awesome emails. And I want to say again that the response to my call for feedback has been incredible. Your questions were so insightful, and I’m so glad that most of you “got” what I’m trying to do here.

Speaking of which, quite a few of you wanted to know about the possibility of an afterlife. Actually, that was probably the most popular question. I’m going to do my best to answer it, but ahh, this is such a tricky one. Short answer: no. Let me explain, though.

There are a bunch of purely technical problems involved in creating an afterlife for you guys. First of all: where to put it? Basically, I’d have to create a whole new map, which would have to exist in its own new project file. Then I’d have to find out how to automatically move your final save state to that map the moment you die (no way I could do this manually), “resurrect” it there and repair/heal whatever it was that killed you.

Oh, and since this is the afterlife, you’d have to be effectively immortal there. This isn’t technically impossible, but it’s also a huge pain in the ass. One of the only ways I can keep Salamerta from turning into a complete shit show is with some carefully calibrated Malthusian population control. Otherwise we’d run out of resources way too fast. Sending everyone who dies into another map where they’re all immortal? I mean, even if I make it so you don’t have to eat, you’re going to fill up the afterlife map ridiculously quickly. So I’d have to make it super huge, or have it constantly growing. I can set it so land masses generate more or less algorithmically, thank god, so I wouldn’t have to worry about designing every inch of the thing, but the server load would be ridiculous. I’m already kind of at the limit of my resources here. Right now I have Salamerta running on an Amazon cloud server, and it’s starting to feel like a very expensive hobby.

Oh, and if I wanted it to be any sort of conventional afterlife, I’d obviously need two maps. And that would introduce a whole complicated sorting issue I don’t want to get anywhere near :).

I know this is going to be a disappointment to a lot of you, but until I figure it out, there’s nothing much I can do. I’m definitely not ruling it out, and I do have some ideas, but it’s going to have to wait for a later iteration.

Speaking of which, many of you probably aren’t going to be wild about where this is going either, but I’ve learned so much about this whole process in the last little while that some of my more obvious, newbie-ish mistakes are starting to really bug me. Ever wonder why there are basically thirteen identical mountains in a row in the northeastern province? Well, that was just me cutting-and-pasting lazily when I was trying to finish the map, and by the time I got around to doing something about it, there were a bunch of (really cool) towns already there. It still makes me cringe, no offence. I also have no idea why I put two major trading cities so close to each other on the east coast; it bums me out that neither Mangava nor Pomkar never got to flourish because of that dumb error.

And there are subtler problems, stuff only I can see. I know with some “under the hood” tweaks I can do something about Jarascal’s chronically low birth weights, and by fiddling with some of the personality algorithms I can even lower rates of infidelity globally (some of you actually wrote in complaining about this). I can put in less Rhodochrosite, haha.

I just have a huge list of fixes. I admit it: I’m a bit of a perfectionist, for better or worse. Basically, when I look at Salamerta, all I can see is all the flaws, and it kind of drives me crazy.

The good news is I have tons of ideas of how I can not just fix all those issues, but make the world even better and more robust. I want more cultures, more resources, a lot more history and fun stuff for its inhabitants to discover. A way bigger map! The next Salamerta is going to be awesome, and I know some of you will appreciate what I have in mind for it. But yeah, for any of this stuff to work, it’ll have to be seeded in from the very beginning. I’ll more or less have to “reboot” the world and to start the instance from scratch.

Before you freak out, let me also say that I’m not just going to shut the whole thing down unceremoniously. I’ve thought about it a bunch and that just doesn’t seem right. So here’s my compromise, and I think it’s a fair one: I’m just going to pull the fertility slider down to zero. You can live out the rest of your lives as Salamerta’s last generation, have fun, do whatever you feel is meaningful, and when you’re done, I’ll start over from scratch. (From my point of view, it’ll only take a few hours.)

I know a lot of you are really attached to Salamerta, and trust me, if anyone understands where you’re coming from, it’s me. It’s embarrassing to admit it, but this little world I’ve created has basically taken over my life. But that just makes me more excited about what’s coming next. The next version of our little world is going to rock ;).

Comments are turned off for this post.

Well, it looks like our endorsement of Donald Trump really moved the needle for the man who is the essence of the modern Republican party, and we’re that much closer to his presidency becoming an actual thing that is going to happen and not just a terrible stand-up routine you’d boo some lazy comedian off stage for trying to pull on you once he ran out of decent material. I wonder if when the aliens land on the charred wreckage of our planet a thousand years from now and read the runes they will get to the part about Super Tuesday and go, “Oh, yeah, now we understand how this happened.” Fortunately, it won’t be my problem. Or any of ours! We’ll all be so very dead! Can you even BELIEVE IT? Anyway, maybe this new video from M83 will distract you for a few minutes. I have nothing better on offer, sorry. Enjoy.

★★★ Overhead at the school dropoff were lovely puffy clouds on blue. By the time the kettle was back on upstairs, the view out the west had gone fully gray. Gulls flying under the oncoming darkness caught the sun from the east and flashed like scraps of reflective metal. A shower wetted down the wooden tables on the roof across the avenue. The clouds thinned out. Breeze sent ripples across the puddles. Both sides of the avenue were sunny for the early pickup from preschool, and the little shadow held hands with the big shadow straight ahead on the sidewalk.

by The Awl

We’re thrilled to announce that Silvia Killingsworth will be joining us here in April. Silvia is currently the Managing Editor of the New Yorker, where she has spent the last seven years managing the workflow of the magazine. (You may also know her from the web’s greatest food vertical, De Gustibus.) Silvia’s breadth of experience and wealth of ideas and just genuine enthusiasm (an emotion you may have noticed as being in short supply over the last, say, seven years here) about things make her the clear and obvious choice to head The Awl as it evolves into its next stage of life. In fact, we’re so impressed by her vision for the site that we have also tasked her to oversee the revival of The Hairpin, which will begin at roughly the same time. It’s an enormous undertaking, but we would not have assigned it to any one person unless we were completely convinced that she was eager and able to do it. We hope you’re as excited as we are to watch this new phase unfold, and we ask you to join us in welcoming Silvia aboard. In even better news, her opinions on coffee are restrained and in no way doctrinaire. Thank you.

by Caroline Diggins

Even before I knew the word “infertile” applied to me, I found it needlessly accusatory, like a lot of terms that get assigned to female bodies: “incompetent cervix” or “poor responder.” I always hated listening to my sisters and friends talk about the particular circuitry of their female parts, and my prudishness has been the subject of their teasing for years. But I think I knew intuitively, even as a girl, that our bodies were capable of destroying us in ways that we could not fathom, that we did not quite have language for.

My husband gets irritated, and I suppose slightly nervous, when I periodically ask him, “What’s it like to have a penis?” Not that I especially want one, but I am impressed by how straightforward they are: easily accessible, easily excitable. This has always struck me as slightly unfair, and never more than now. As a couple, we were recently diagnosed with “unexplained infertility,” after bloodwork for both of us; a semen analysis for him; and three rounds of fertility drugs, a trans-vaginal ultrasound, and something called an hysterosalpingogram for me. During an HSG, which is meant to determine whether or not you have any blockage in your fallopian tubes, a speculum is inserted into your vagina, a catheter is inserted into your cervix, a balloon is inserted into the catheter, the balloon is filled with dye, and the dye is released to move freely through your fallopian tubes. The pressure of the balloon filling up feels similar to the initial sensations Gilbert Kane must have experienced in Alien, right before his chest exploded; the available literature describes it as “light cramping.” My face was so white after the doctor finally removed the balloon from my uterus that she insisted I lie down and drink a juice box. Which I did, while bursting into tears at the news that my tubes “looked great.” I still don’t know if I was crying out of relief or frustration or the inhumanity of being pumped up like a bicycle tire.

At my doctor’s office, I never feel like a woman so much as a container for a faulty uterus. On the rare occasion that I’m called in by name, it’s never pronounced correctly (yet the doctor’s staff has no trouble with “estradiol” or “prolactin” or the aforementioned hysterosalpingogram). I vacillate between being outraged by this whole process and completely devastated by it. I had to tell my boss that I needed to use my flex time to start pursuing “intrauterine insemination protocols.” He could not have been kinder or more understanding, and yet to my horror I was crying — WITH SNOT — before I had even completed this sentence: “Chris and I are trying to have a baby, and so far it’s not going very well.” (Which, to be in the position where I can both afford infertility treatments and work for a company that allows me the flexibility necessary to pursue them is a tremendous gift. “What would you do,” I have been asking myself since I first began suspecting something was wrong, “if you didn’t have Chris? If you didn’t have this job? If you didn’t have this insurance? What options would you have?” The answers are, “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know” and “none.”)

A popular piece of trivia from infertility blogs and websites is that an infertility diagnosis is as psychologically devastating as a cancer or HIV diagnosis, and many fertility experts will tell you that there is no small amount of grief involved in processing this news. I’m lucky enough to have never suffered from either, so I guess I’m not in any position to weigh in. But I don’t know if it’s grief I feel so much as righteous indignation. I never thought I’d be here, mostly because I never thought I’d have trouble having a baby. It had occurred to me, fleetingly, in the “noted and moving on” way of most modern optimists, but I always assumed infertility would be someone else’s problem. Now that it’s mine, I’m a lot less surprised by my diagnosis than I am by my reaction to it.

To find myself in the position where I have to announce, somewhat publicly, that I want to be a mother so badly that I am going to start paying groups of strangers to inject me with drugs, poke me with catheters and needles, probe me with cameras, and pump me full of what they refer to as my husband’s “washed” semen, fills me with an anger I find isolating and difficult to articulate. So I obsessively scour the internet for information about other infertile women. I’ve read every essay I can find on the subject, even the flowery ones that compare uteruses and their contents to various types of fruit (so long, my lifelong love affair with pears). My least favorite colleague has caught me reading articles about endometriosis and listening to disquietingly chipper podcasts about PCOS. I have visited message boards full of acronyms that confuse and disgust me: TTC, TWW, MENTS, DH, AF, BD, OPK, BFP, BFN (more horrifying are the words they spell out: cervical mucus, creamy cervical mucus, not a lot of cervical mucus, baby dust). There’s a whole language around infertility that I never wanted to learn, yet I find myself constantly stalking these boards, drawing comfort from magical thinking strangers who write sentences like, “I pray your rainbow baby is on her way.” I have a hard time with stranger prayers and rainbow babies, but I can appreciate their origins.

As a woman, you spend a lot of energy trying to ignore what our culture constantly tells you: that your worth is equal to the sum of your parts and how appealing they are. Are your breasts big enough? Is your stomach flat enough, your ass bouncy enough, your hair lustrous enough where we want to see it and eradicated where we don’t? As a woman battling infertility, you’re battling the language of your body in the same way, the words are just different and the checklist is turned inside out. Is your uterine lining thick and lustrous? Are your eggs beautiful and abundant? Do your tubes look good? Can your cervix cooperate?

Blunt, wrenchingly instructive medical language seems available only when it can insult you or gross you out. Words that might actually help prepare you for what’s to come — like the ones that could tell you, concretely, whether or not you can ever actually have a healthy baby — aren’t available. It’s all percentages, acronyms, inscrutable hormone levels, and diagnoses that describe your body’s failings without offering ways to correct them. I have been told countless times by the staff at my clinic that in vitro fertilization can be a “great diagnostic tool.” That’s a cute way of saying, “For fifteen thousand dollars, there’s a chance we might be able to find out a little bit more about what’s wrong with you. Dildo cameras, light surgery, and lots of needles, will also be involved. No guarantees, though.”

I don’t delude myself that the experience of actually being pregnant would be much better, at least from a medical standpoint. Or from a cultural one. In fact, one of the more excruciating stops I’ve made on my infertility tour was the baby shower of an old friend. The shower was hosted by a woman who had gone deep into that middle-class earth mother thing: she wore no bra and no shoes and served the guests obscure tea blends out of handmade, lopsided mugs. She gifted my friend with used cloth diapers and kicked the shower off by inviting all of us to wash the expectant mother’s feet, using a giant vat of hot water and some type of Burt’s Bees product. Then, sitting cross-legged on her living room floor with my friend’s foot in her hands, our braless host began making a speech about pregnancy as an ancient and warrior-like tradition, how birthing a child was the truest expression of womanhood, and how you’re not fully a woman until you experience it.

There has to be something in between “incompetent cervix” and “magical warrior woman.” I certainly don’t think of childbirth as a prerequisite for living as an authentic woman. I think of it as something gross and painful and necessary; something with an end result that would make it worth enduring, if you wanted or were able to endure it in the first place. What infertility requires, more than deep pockets or flex time or a softening of boundaries and appetite for acronyms, is the ability to take inventory of a sea of unknowns and from them make a decision about how much you’re willing to endure, and at what cost. I’m almost three years into my fertility quest now, and getting closer to making that kind of decision. My husband and I are considering adoption, but we’re at the very beginning stages of that journey and we have yet to learn that language. I’m hoping it will be easier to understand.

Photo by The Farmstrs

I can’t say for certain what your day will be like, but given the way most days turn out the odds are probably not in your favor. That’s okay. You’ll get through it. Let me say here that I hope you have a few more bright spots in it than just the music you hear in the morning, but if this music is your only bright spot it will still be okay, because this track is terrific. It might even fool you into thinking that things will be less terrible than they’re going to be. Enjoy. [Via]

★★★★ The playground was not as overrun with children as it might have been, but the sun succeeded at warming the places where it fell. Back out on Broadway, the breeze had a chill to it. The doors of the hot dog place were closed against it, and had to be wrestled open with a balance bike and scooter in one hand. Even as the warmth lagged a little, though, the daylight had gone over to abundance. Past four in the afternoon the sun was up in the tree buds and had found a place to shine on near the top of the wall, in the narrow darkness of the forecourt. The four-year-old tried to bait other children into racing scooters against him. In the night someone was on the rooftop across the way grilling, in shorts but with a sweatshirt hood pulled up, as smoke curled in the electric lights.

by Laur M. Jackson

Madame Sisseretta Blandish’s near-patented hair-straightening system drew customers from as far as New Jersey to her Harlem salon. But like many of New York’s successful set, Blandish was just one bad business cycle away from destitution, and after the New Year, business began to slow — and then it dropped off dramatically, to nothing. Blandish’s absent clientele was hardly a mystery to her though; she knew what made her old regulars scurry past her shop with downturned faces: Why pay for a regular follicle pull and burn in a new world where whiteness could be purchased for just fifty dollars?

This logic undergirds the plot of George S. Schuyler’s 1931 Black No More, a science-fiction novel where The Negro Problem is all but solved by black physician Junius Crookman’s discovery of how to turn black people white. At-once miraculous and banal, Schuyler’s transformative science is hardly so elaborate as its contemporary equivalent, Your Face in Mine. Dr. Crookman’s procedure merely suppresses melanin in the skin, reduces — slightly — the size of the nose and lips, and permanently de-kinks hair to make patients irreversibly indistinguishable from their natural-born white counterparts. A play on the novel’s own name for relaxer creams — “Kink No More” — Black No More signifies not so much a radical insertion into the market as a technological upgrade that commandeers a ready consumer base. Once the best and only option to buy into whiteness, Madame Blandish’s hair straightening process — an obvious nod to Madame CJ Walker — is no match for Crookman’s color-crossing sanitariums.

Black No More echoes the public sentiments of its author, who declared in an essay called “Negro-Art Hokum” (to which Langston Hughes famously responded) that “the Aframerican is merely a lamp-blacked Anglo-Saxon.” Black Americans are just “plain Americans,” he asserts, a tinted version of their white peers and thus different by color, not culture. As with any satirist, Schuyler’s earnestness is hard to read. It’s fair to say he saw region and class as much more cohesive features than skin color, and that anything like a coherent Black culture — music, speech, style — in America is only tenuously held together by a mutual response to racism.

Even if few would agree with Schuyler’s even-then controversial statements, we in the contemporary are not quite hostile to the idea of Black American culture as ever obscured by an ongoing relation to the status of subjugation; even our most celebratory and even frivolous modes of expression remain ripe for politics. As Vinson Cunningham wrote last summer, Black artistic production in America has historically been caught within “a tragic conundrum” of aesthetics and politics. For the Black individual, the “tragic conundrum” extends into everyday life. Personal aesthetic choices as simple as the music you listen to, the clothing you wear, and general relation to all things bougie transform into heuristic judgments about political affiliation, intensity, or loyalty. Even if this phenomenon isn’t limited to Black life specifically — we are all in some sense judged this way — it takes on a particular antagonism when one’s appearance assumes a proscribed relation to a constantly wavering pro-Black standard.

It’s a rather pervasive myth about Black culture that frames even on-the-ground creativity as in some way responsive to white supremacy. As a remix of whiteness. But I have to ask, what happens to style and creativity in a rush to politicize?

As with every move Beyoncé makes, the surprise video release of “Formation” and its performance during halftime at the Super Bowl opened the discursive floodgates for stans, naysayers, and ambivalent audiences alike. Amongst topics ranging from police brutality, queer movement and visuality, and fraught racial terminology, one iteration of the conversation about “Formation” was the politics of hair: Some were quick to catalogue in near shot-for-shot detail the diverse spectrum of styles represented; for others, the lyric, “I like my baby hair with baby hair and afros,” overlaid footage of Blue’s impossibly adorable ‘fro, resonated as the powerful affirmative statement on Black hair. Fader’s Naomi Zeichner and Judnick Maynard also mentioned Blue’s hair as part of the video’s “front and center” display of what they call Beyoncé’s “kitchen politics,” a term that acquires additional vernacular meaning in the context of Blackness and hair. And as “Godmother of Brown Beauty Blogging,” Patrice Yursik told Dazed, Beyoncé’s hair “is a political statement.”

Perhaps less vocal, some did bemoan the sight of Bey — the lone long-hair-don’t-care blonde amongst the fro formation — as a saboteur in her own pro-Black message. Professor Yaba Blay, also looking at Blue, wonders about the invitation to contrast one child with two others “significantly darker than her and dressed like old women afraid of the sun.” Given New Orleans’ particularly troubling history with colorism and preference for those “light skinned, with non-kinky hair,” Blay is concerned that Beyoncé is once again instrumentalizing her appearance — along with her daughter’s — this time accompanied by a regional, living backdrop that goes soul-deep for so many. Meanwhile, Twitter offered the usual mixed bag of readings in real time, proposing the possible political in/significance of afros, braids, and blonde hair virtually since the video’s release. “There’s tension between Blackness and Whiteness and the Desire to Be Black and the Desire to Be White,” one user tweeted the next morning, already siphoning the multicolored visual display into an antimony between pro-Blackness and white supremacy.

It’s a tale arrested in time. Wherever the fabulousness of a Black femme’s hair appears, the leap to politics can’t be far behind. Even the “politics of black hair” is a trope approaching trite. Of course hair and politics remain relevant discussion partners to the extent that hair can be political, but there’s a slippage that concerns me; what either side of the debate have in common is a longing to project a desireable or undesireable politics onto a complex cultural aesthetic. Rawiya Kameir’s claim that the success of “Formation” is “casually weaving [a] politic in with the rest of [Beyoncé’s] aesthetic” may just be true. But who’s holding the thread?

It’s no secret that we’re well within something of a natural hair renaissance — a Black-made (and I’ll assert, Black-only) cultural movement producing flush commercial and economic opportunities for Black ingénues as well as liberating narratives. Unfortunately, the increased visibility of natural hair has in turn provided extra opportunity for what can only be seen as misogynoirist political projections onto the hair of Black femmes. Many, Black and non-Black alike, like to weave political assumptions into our hair unwarranted. Natural hair, or at least the appearance of afro-texture, is unsurprisingly associated with pro-Black progressive thought. Meanwhile weave, wigs, and relaxer become renewed symbols of a slumberous mind tantalized by a European standard and infatuated with white supremacy by proxy. (This division then doubles back to accrue further assumptions in the social. BuzzFeed’s Hannah Giorgis closely analyzes the problematic of Black women’s hair in film where — as a close mirror to every day experience — proximity to the appearance of respectable hair forms is what determines whether or not we are worthy of love.) It’s as if we’ve resurrected Schuyler’s version of nineteen-twenties Harlem, where hair manipulation can only be read as an effort to “appear as much like white folks as possible.”

And yet, Black hair is rarely styled with an image of whiteness in mind: be it straight, twisted, braided, red, black, blue, purple, grey, blonde, caramel, curled, curly, poufed, bobbed, bouffant, or pulled up. Nevermind eons of cultural exchange across the diaspora, a consideration of Black hair in America over the past century alone more than complicates the notion that how we style ourselves is in any sense strictly political. Looking fly is a labor not necessarily made legible to activism.

At issue here is the political overdetermination of cultural aesthetic. These sudden leaps, from image to politics, reifies a cultural proximity to whiteness that ultimately shortchanges us as cultural purveyors of our own hair technologies. As if Black culture is forevermore locked with white supremacy in some wholly unimaginative cycle of replication, imitation, and subversion — whereby everything molded onto or sprung from a Black mode of living must somehow be a reflection of living marginalized. But Black hair needn’t be political in every situation. “Black hair,” culturally understood, is entirely inclusive of the techniques and inventions made in our spaces; that includes wigs, weaves, and all the creative technologies signified in those practices. That also includes the revolutionary developments, from vixen sew-ins to invisible parts, made by the community’s hair virtuosos, themselves incredibly diverse: trans, cis, genderfluid, from virtually every corner of a broadly queer constellation.

Which brings us back to Beyoncé, an artist who’s no doubt experimented with every evolution of cap, closure, tape, track, thread, glue, lacefront, rodset, iron, and bodywave over her career to showcase the range of styles we know and (mostly) love. There’s hardly a need to rehearse the way in which the artist’s penchant for blonde in every and any style imaginable poses an easy target for those stuck in a causal understanding of hair and politics. Yet seldom acknowledged is that from 2006’s “Green Light” to 2014’s “7/11” — “a perm that’s been left to long” to “sweatin’ out my press” — Bey continually uses Black vernacular to describe her hair in lyric.

While we’re all doing theory here, perhaps Bey’s hairfile is actually best considered a career long recognition of the already inherent Blackness of a spectrum of Black hair forms. A not apolitical or depolitical, but rather not-always-political display of Black hair diversity. A voluminous blonde wig is formally and culturally black as hell not because of political symbolism, but because of a vastly networked creative tradition worn and invented by Black folks, for Black folks.

Life is suffering. Each morning opens you up to another spin of the wheel on the continuum of sorrow. The best days are the ones where you are only aware of your agony in brief bits, being too busy with other emotions to really remember how terrible everything else is. So I am not sure how to console you about this being a bonus day of torment and existential dread. I hate to keep falling back on, “In the end nothing matters anyway,” but sometimes all that’s left to you is the truth. At least this track is very pretty and should help you to forget for a few minutes. Enjoy.

★★ A bright and promising sky, of broken silvery white and gray on blue, had closed over by the walk to school. A male house sparrow chirped in a leafless little street tree, unwilling to give up. It was mild but would get no milder. A banner for free preschool had half-fallend from a fence, and rainwater had pooled in the downed portion. Scattered stamp-sized plastic ziplock bags cast their little water-shadows on the sidewalk. Some blue raced briefly overhead around midday and departed. By school pickup the temperature was plunging; the phone battery died less than half an hour off the plug. Some sort of cold spray was blowing. After dark, the sky and clouds had separated out into the rusty city-night equivalents of blue and white, but the spitting drops were still on the wind.