Author: Gesi Lloyd

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,…

Four astronauts lifted off from Kennedy Space Center this evening, beginning a 10-day journey that will take them farther from Earth than any humans have traveled before. The 6:24 p.m. EDT launch of NASA’s Artemis II mission, the first crewed flight toward the moon since Apollo 17 more than five decades ago, carried Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen aboard the agency’s Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft. Weather conditions cooperated. The 45th Weather Squadron had placed the probability of acceptable conditions at 80%, with a two-hour launch window offering additional flexibility.…

A federal judge has cleared the way for Viacom’s trademark lawsuit against the Zeus Network to move intodiscovery, ruling Monday that the case over Nick Cannon’s new show ‘Bad vs. Wild’ presents enough merit to proceed. Judge Arun Subramanian declined to dismiss the suit, which accuses Zeus of modeling its program so closely on Cannon’s long-running MTV series ‘Wild ‘N Out’ that viewers could reasonably mistake one for the other. The ruling keeps the legal pressure on Zeus while stopping short of endorsing every claim Viacom brought to court. The judge dismissed the copyright portion of the case, but the…

Terry Pitchford has been on Mississippi’s death row since 2006. On March 31, the United States Supreme Court will hear arguments about whether the jury that put him there was chosen fairly. Pitchford was convicted of murder in connection with a robbery in which a shopkeeper was shot and killed. The jury that decided his fate included one Black juror. The county where the trial took place is roughly 40% Black. Four Black prospective jurors were removed by the prosecutor during jury selection. Pitchford’s legal team has argued for years that those removals were racially motivated, a violation of the…

When Lamar Odom woke up from his coma, doctors told him he would never walk again. They also told him he would never talk again. He has spent the years since proving both of those predictions wrong, and on March 31 he sits down with Netflix to explain what it actually felt like from the inside. Untold: The Death and Life of Lamar Odom arrives on the streaming platform as part of Netflix’s ongoing sports documentary series, and it promises something more than a career retrospective. Based on the trailer and Odom’s own recent comments, it is a first-person account…

Dawn Staley watched her team win by 26 points on Saturday night in Sacramento and walked away looking for things to fix. That might be the most unsettling detail in the entire story for whoever faces South Carolina next. The Gamecocks defeated Oklahoma 94-68 in the Sweet 16 of the women’s NCAA Tournament, advancing to the Elite Eight with a performance that was dominant from the opening possession and still left their head coach believing there is another level to reach. South Carolina has now appeared in six of the last eight Final Fours and won three national championships during…