Author: Gesi Lloyd

On January 10, Gucci Mane traveled to Dallas for what he understood to be a business meeting at a recording studio. It had been arranged by one of his own signed artists and Shiesty. What happened instead, according to federal prosecutors, was a coordinated armed robbery and kidnapping involving nine people who had traveled from Memphis specifically to carry it out. The U.S. Department of Justice announced the arrests on April 1. Pooh Shiesty, born Lontrell Denell Williams Jr., was taken into custody by the FBI in Dallas. Eight of the nine defendants named in the case were arrested the…

2 Chainz was not expecting his commute to go the way it did. The Atlanta rapper, born Tauheed Epps, found himself in a tense roadside confrontation this week that he documented on Instagram for his followers to witness firsthand. The video, posted on March 31, shows an unidentified woman pulling up alongside his vehicle and launching into a loud, expletive-heavy tirade from behind the wheel of her own car. She can be seen repeatedly gesturing at him, at one point extending her bare foot out the window in what appeared to be a continuation of the same energy. 2 Chainz…

Michigan gas prices have climbed to an average of $3.89 per gallon, up from $2.99 just one month ago. That is a roughly 30% increase in 30 days, leaving drivers paying 97 cents more per gallon than last month and 82 cents more than this time last year. The spike is part of a broader national trend. According to AAA, the national average gas price reached $4.08 per gallon on April 2, up from $3.98 one week earlier and $3.00 on March 5. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer responded Today by declaring an energy emergency in Michigan, issuing Executive Order 2026-4 with…

Tiger Woods had no public comment the night of March 27. The bodycam footage released this week by the Martin County Sheriff’s office in Florida did the talking for him. The video, obtained through the Associated Press, captures the 15-time major champion standing at the side of a Florida road, handcuffed, after failing portions of a field sobriety test. The footage offers the most detailed public account yet of what unfolded after Woods’ Land Rover clipped a pressure washer trailer attached to a truck on South Beach Road near Hobe Sound Beach, causing his SUV to flip over. What the…

When Ziwe asked Leslie Jones whether she could ever see herself as a tradwife, the answer came fast. Jones, appearing on Ziwe’s podcast on March 31 to promote her standup special Leslie Jones: Life Part 2, did not pause to consider the question. Her father, she explained, raised her with an explicit message: she was not put on this earth to define herself through a relationship or a domestic role. That lesson stuck. The interview, which covered her rise in comedy, her dating life, and her views on relationships, took its sharpest turn when the conversation reached marriage. Jones did…

The Maryland House of Delegates passed House Bill 552 on March 20 by a vote of 129 to 1, setting the stage for a formal investigation into one of the state’s most quietly buried chapters. The legislation would establish a commission tasked with examining the history, operations, and deaths of children held at the House of Reformation and Instruction for Colored Children, a facility now known as the Cheltenham Youth Detention Center in Prince George’s County. The lone dissenting vote came from State Delegate Robin L. Grammer, Jr. (R-Md.-06), who declined to comment when approached for a response. What Cheltenham…

Randy Slaughter went to a nonprofit hospital in College Station, Texas in April 2024 with severe abdominal pain. He was 36 years old, employed, and covered by health insurance through his job. Over three days, doctors ran tests and held consultations. At the end of it, they could not tell him what was wrong. They sent him home with dietary recommendations. His physical symptoms eventually faded. The bill did not. Slaughter’s hospital stay produced a total charge of $33,393. Because he carried a high-deductible plan with a $10,000 threshold, his out-of-pocket obligation landed at $9,309. He arranged to pay it…

It was just past 1 p.m. on a Wednesday when a Brooklyn mother stepped outside with her two children. She was heading out to pick up a few things, nothing unusual, just a short neighborhood errand. When a loud crack split the air nearby, she thought it was fireworks. It was not fireworks. By 1:46 p.m., her 7-month-old daughter was pronounced dead at Woodhull Hospital in Brooklyn after a stray bullet struck the infant while she sat in her stroller near the intersection of Humboldt Street and Moore Street in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. The shooting, which the NYPD…

The Outsider Art Fair returned this past weekend to do what it has always done best: make the rest of the art world look like it has been asking the wrong questions. Hundreds of artists filled the halls, each one representing a mode of creation that formal institutions were not built to hold. The fair, which has operated with a consistent mission since its founding more than two decades ago and has run full collaborative editions since 2013, exists specifically to spotlight work made outside the architecture of traditional training. What it has become is something larger. It is a…

More than a decade after Lamar Odom was found unresponsive at a Nevada brothel and airlifted to a Las Vegas hospital in critical condition, a new Netflix documentary is bringing that period back into sharp focus. Untold: The Death & Life of Lamar Odom pulls together accounts from the people closest to him during those weeks, and what emerges is a portrait of grief, control, and the collision of two families around one man’s bedside. The docuseries features extended interviews with both Khloe Kardashian, who was legally still Odom’s wife at the time of the 2015 emergency, and Liza Morales,…