Samuel Norris lay down with his eyes wide open, yet all he could see was the darkness pressing in around him. It’s 2025 in the mountains of Estes Park, Colorado, the night his dad remarried. What was supposed to be a celebration for the family was the culmination of some of the darkest years for Norris. The wedding was a reminder that his family was reshaping itself around him, at the exact moment he felt most like he didn’t belong in it. The blackness he was witnessing wasn’t his...

When I was in 8th grade back at the beginning of 2017, my most anticipated project was easily Playboi Carti’s first mixtape. It wasn’t just the music that was alluring to me – it was also all the cosigns stacked around his image before a single song from the project had even dropped: A$AP Rocky signing him to be a part of the A$AP Mob, his ties to Ian Connor, his close friendships with Lil Uzi Vert and Lil Yachty, an unreleased collaboration with Frank Ocean, modeling for Yeezy Season 5, the...

8.5 million people live in New York City and nearly 60,500 of those people go to NYU. In 2021, one of them flew 9,400 miles from Kuala Lumpur to get there. Another flew 4,970 miles from Honolulu. Together they traveled more than 14,000 miles to end up in the same library, at the same table, pretending to study. They never really studied. “We would end up just listening to music or scrolling through Spotify together,” Natalya recalls, laughing a little at the memory. The textbooks stayed...