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After the Verbal Sparring, Covington Dominates Masvidal on the Mat

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After the Verbal Sparring, Covington Dominates Masvidal on the Mat

After a fast trade of punches to open the ultimate spherical of the primary occasion at U.F.C. 272, the welterweight contender Colby Covington superior on Jorge Masvidal, bulldozed him into the fence and dragged him to the canvas.

Some folks on the sold-out T-Cellular Area in Las Vegas booed Covington for dampening the motion. The U.F.C. offered the bout between Covington, a former star wrestler at Oregon State, and Masvidal, a 37-year-old veteran who graduated from yard fights in Miami to the game’s main leagues, as a blood feud. And the pair did ship motion befitting a combat borne of real mutual dislike. By the combat’s midpoint, Covington’s ground-and-pound had bloodied Masvidal’s nostril, and a Masvidal elbow strike had minimize Covington above the left eye.

However it was nonetheless a contest, and Covington, 34, loved a large benefit when the combat went to the mat. So he managed Masvidal in Spherical 5 the best way he had within the earlier 4 and earned a unanimous choice win.

And the bout was additionally huge enterprise, much less due to the stakes than the characters concerned. Masvidal was 2-2 in his final 4 bouts, however he’s a dependable motion fighter who eagerly indulges in pre-fight trash discuss. Covington had misplaced two of his final three, however he has grown his following since rebranding himself as an outspoken right-wing antihero. Neither fighter entered Saturday as a champion, and every had misplaced latest challenges for Kamaru Usman’s welterweight title.

However Covington and Masvidal had been shut pals turned rivals. Saturday’s bout was a contest between athletes, nevertheless it was additionally a literal combat between real-life enemies, and the animosity helped promote the occasion.

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In accordance with Dana White, the U.F.C. president, the combat card attracted 19,425 spectators and generated $6.76 million in ticket income. Whereas pay-per-view figures nonetheless weren’t accessible, White stated he anticipated sturdy outcomes.

“This combat outperformed the price range huge time, simply on the gate alone,” White stated at a information convention.

Covington (17-3) and Masvidal (35-16) had been every assured a reported $500,000, although Masvidal, who signed a brand new contract with the U.F.C. final week, may also earn a bonus based mostly on pay-per-view gross sales. Covington, nonetheless, fought for a flat payment.

“It wasn’t about cash tonight,” stated Covington, the U.F.C.’s top-ranked welterweight contender. “It was a private rivalry that wanted to get settled, and it acquired settled.”

The contract and its phrases had been amongst only a few topics Covington and Masvidal might agree on main into the grudge match. In addition they each acknowledge that they grew to become as shut as brothers by coaching collectively after Covington, who grew up in Oregon, relocated to suburban Miami to begin his blended martial arts profession. Covington moved in with Masvidal and his spouse on the time, and the fighters routinely labored one another’s corners.

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However within the lead-up to Saturday’s primary occasion, they disagreed on most different matters.

Why did their friendship finish?

Masvidal stated they broke up over Covington’s refusal to pay a coach who labored with each of them, however Covington stated Masvidal merely grew jealous of Covington’s rising profile.

Who acquired the higher of their coaching classes at American High Staff in Coconut Creek, Fla.?

Masvidal stated he did, as soon as he adjusted to Covington’s world-class wrestling abilities. Covington maintained that he routinely manhandled Masvidal at apply.

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And which man is the extra loyal supporter of former President Donald J. Trump?

Masvidal claims that he’s and that Covington is clueless about Trump’s insurance policies. Covington wears “Make America Nice Once more” hats in public, and stated he was in touch with Trump’s household early final week.

However as soon as the preventing went from verbal to bodily, the stalemate ended and Covington imposed his wrestling ability and peerless conditioning on Masvidal.

Early in Spherical 1, Masvidal landed a kick to Covington’s proper leg that left a crimson mark. Masvidal, as a result of he was the extra expert striker, most popular to combat standing and at a distance.

Covington responded by forcing Masvidal to the fence and, ultimately, to the bottom, the place the writhing, grappling, clutching and grinding favored the previous faculty wrestler.

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Masvidal inflicted some injury: An elbow strike minimize Covington over the left eye, and one other kick left a big welt on Covington’s left hamstring. However Covington managed the combat, repeatedly dumping Masvidal to the mat and sapping his vitality with lengthy stretches of wrestling.

“He took my again and rode me fairly good,” Masvidal stated. “It left me a bit flat.”

Late in Spherical 4, Masvidal related with a proper hook that dropped Covington to a knee. However Masvidal couldn’t muster the vitality to comply with up. In a single clinch, Masvidal, bleeding from the bridge of his nostril, rested his head on Covington’s shoulder and drew some deep breaths.

Covington, recovered, completed the spherical pushing ahead, touchdown punches.

Covington stated he was dominant all through the entire bout. “I used to be prepared for 5 extra rounds within the parking zone,” he stated.

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Pierre Joris, Translator of the ‘Impossible’ Paul Celan, Dies at 78

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Pierre Joris, Translator of the ‘Impossible’ Paul Celan, Dies at 78

Pierre Joris, a poet and translator who tackled some of the 20th century’s most difficult verse, rendering into English the complex work of the German-Romanian poet Paul Celan, died on Feb. 27 at his home in Brooklyn. He was 78.

His wife, Nicole Peyraffite, said the cause was complications of cancer.

Mr. Joris was the author of dozens of volumes of his own poetry and prose. But much of his life’s work was spent grappling with the poetry of Celan, whom many critics considered, in the words of one scholar, “arguably the greatest European poet in the postwar period.”

That greatness comes with a hitch for readers, though: the fiendish difficulty of a writer whose lyrics were formed and deformed by the crucible of the Holocaust — “that which happened,” as Celan termed it. Both his parents were murdered by the Nazis in what is now Romania. Less than 30 years later, Celan put an end to his own life in France, jumping into the Seine river in 1970 at the age of 49.

In between, he felt he had to invent a new version of German, the cultured language he was brought up in as a member of the Jewish bourgeoisie in Czernowitz (now part of Ukraine). But it had to be cleansed of Nazi barbarism.

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The result would be “truly an invented German,” as Mr. Joris (pronounced JOR-iss) wrote in the introduction to “Breathturn Into Timestead” (2014), his translations of Celan’s later works.

A public reading of Celan’s best-known work, the hypnotic “Death Fugue,” was “an epiphany” for Mr. Joris as a 15-year-old high school student in his native Luxembourg, he told the New York State Writers Institute in 2014. The poem was inspired by the murder of Celan’s mother in 1942.

“My hair stood on end,” Mr. Joris recalled.

The poem, as translated by Mr. Joris, begins:

Black milk of morning, we drink you at dusktime
we drink you at noontime and dawntime we drink you at night
we drink and we drink

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But “Death Fugue” was an early work, later partly disavowed by Celan. It is the enigmatic poetry of his final years that Mr. Joris was determined to take on.

The “untranslatability” of late Celan “is a truism in critical discussion,” the poet and critic Adam Kirsch wrote in The New York Review of Books in 2016, in a largely favorable review of Mr. Joris’s work.

Mr. Joris took on the challenge. “He did the impossible, because it is impossible to translate Celan,” the Romanian-American poet Andrei Codrescu said in an interview.

In eight books of translations published over more than 50 years, beginning when he was an undergraduate at Bard College in 1967, Mr. Joris sought to render in English Celan’s experiment with language: to transmit what can’t be rendered in words — the Holocaust and its many aftermaths, physical and psychological — by creating an open-ended poetry of multiple possible meanings.

Celan’s poetry “is the work that came out of the mid-20th century that most directly addresses the disaster, if you want, of Western culture,” Mr. Joris told the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2021.

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“The absolute poem — no, it certainly does not, cannot, exist,” Celan said in a famous speech in Germany in 1960, when he was awarded a literary prize. And so the translator of Celan has latitude, which Mr. Joris took advantage of — to mostly good effect, in the eyes of critics.

Celan’s “view is bound to destabilize any concept of the poem as some fixed and absolute artifact,” Mr. Joris commented in his introduction to “Breathturn.”

At the level of the words themselves, a translator might thus opt for what Mr. Joris termed “elegant, easily readable and accessible American versions of German.” He rejected that approach.

Instead, he tried to recreate Celan’s many startling neologisms in English, as the Princeton critic Michael Wood noted, citing, among many other examples, “starred-over,” “ensummered,” “night-cradled,” “day-removed,” “worlddownward” and “more heartnear.”

“There are some words that I’m still looking for, that I haven’t found yet,” Mr. Joris told the writer Paul Auster in a public dialogue at Deutsches Haus in New York in 2020. “Fearful polysemy.”

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While some critics found this approach heavy-handed, Mr. Wood praised Mr. Joris’s adventurousness. “A poet himself, he is not afraid of strangeness in diction,” Mr. Wood wrote in the London Review of Books in 2021. “He doesn’t seek it out, but he knows when it sounds good. He brings us very close to Celan at work, shows him leading the words along and being led by them, as Celan himself describes the process.”

In an interview with the poet Charles Bernstein in 2023, Mr. Joris referred to Celan as “the bruised, weary, suspicious survivor who prefers to communicate through his poems, poems meant to ‘witness for the witness.’”

Mr. Joris, raised in Luxembourg, the tiny duchy caught between the French- and German-speaking worlds, identified with the linguistic confusion of Celan’s own upbringing in German and Romanian. Mr. Joris grew up speaking the local Germanic dialect, Luxembourgish, as well as German and French. (He called French the “language of the bourgeoisie.”)

Luxembourg, he told Mr. Auster, “has the same complexities of language that Celan grew up in.”

“That polyglot nature of Celan’s upbringing, we share that,” he added.

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Pierre Joseph Joris was born on July 14, 1946, in Strasbourg, France, to Roger Joris, a surgeon, and Nora Joris-Schintgen, who assisted her husband’s practice as an administrator. He graduated from the Lycée Classique in Diekirch, Luxembourg, in 1964, briefly studied medicine in Paris to fulfill the wishes of his parents, and then moved to the United States, where he earned a B.A. from Bard in 1969.

In 1975, he received a master’s degree from the University of Essex in England in the theory and practice of literary translation. From 1976 to 1979, he taught in the English department of Université Constantine 1 in Algeria. He earned a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1990 and taught at SUNY Albany from 1992 to 2013.

In addition to his translations of Celan, Mr. Joris published several volumes of his own poetry, including “Poasis: Selected Poems 1986-1999” (2001) and “Barzakh: Poems 2000-2012” (2014); books of essays, including “A Nomad Poetics” (2003); and translations of Rilke, Edmond Jabès and other poets. He also edited anthologies, including the two-volume “Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry,” with Jerome Rothenberg (1995 and 1998).

In addition to his wife, a performance artist, he is survived by a son, Miles Joris-Peyrafitte; a stepson, Joseph Mastantuono; and a sister, Michou Joris.

Asked to explain why he was drawn to translating, Mr. Joris told the periodical Arabic Literature in 2011: “Because, by accident of birth, I was blessed or damned with a batch of different languages and a perverse pleasure of pitting them and their different musics against each other.”

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Aaron Rodgers to Giants? Justin Fields to Jets? QB predictions for every NFL team

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Aaron Rodgers to Giants? Justin Fields to Jets? QB predictions for every NFL team

The first quarterback domino didn’t end up falling.

If the Rams and Matthew Stafford had gone through with a divorce — which felt like a real possibility for a few days as the Raiders and Giants were prepared to offer significant money and draft capital to reel him in — it would’ve caused a chain reaction throughout the league. The Rams might have turned their attention to Aaron Rodgers, or Sam Darnold, or someone else. And that would have changed the options available for the other teams seeking a quarterback.

Instead, Stafford is staying in Los Angeles, leaving quarterback-needy teams looking at a mostly uninspiring quarterback market, both in free agency and in the NFL Draft.

Last year, I predicted how all the quarterback openings would be filled and … didn’t do as terribly as I remembered. Some of my hits: Bears (Caleb Williams), Buccaneers (Baker Mayfield), Falcons (Kirk Cousins), Vikings (Sam Darnold), Patriots (Jacoby Brissett), Giants (Daniel Jones) and Seahawks (Geno Smith). The misses: Broncos (Sam Howell), Steelers (Kenny Pickett and Ryan Tannehill), Raiders (Jayden Daniels) and Commanders (Drake Maye). I also sent J.J. McCarthy to the Giants, Bo Nix to the Patriots and Michael Penix Jr. to the Seahawks.

Last season, I listed nine teams as open for business — and a few more that were on the fence. There are fewer obvious openings in this cycle, and fewer exciting options on the open market too.

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The legal tampering period for free agency opens next Monday at noon ET, so this felt like a good time to look ahead and predict what teams will do at quarterback.

Let’s handicap this year’s field by first figuring out how many jobs are open, which jobs might be open, and which teams are already set at starting quarterback.

Safe, but something to prove

That leaves six teams as open for business: Browns, Giants, Jets, Raiders, Steelers, Titans.

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Notable options

Let’s run through the starting-caliber — or borderline starting-caliber — quarterbacks who could be available this offseason.

NFL Draft: Cam Ward, Shedeur Sanders, Jaxson Dart, Tyler Shough, Jalen Milroe

Free Agency: Aaron Rodgers, Sam Darnold, Russell Wilson, Justin Fields, Jameis Winston, Jimmy Garoppolo, Carson Wentz, Daniel Jones, Marcus Mariota

Trade/Potential cap cut: Kirk Cousins, Gardner Minshew, Kenny Pickett, Tanner McKee, Joe Milton

With the six “open for business” teams, plus four others that could get involved in the QB market, here are my predictions…

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Browns: Kirk Cousins and Jalen Milroe

The rumblings out of Indianapolis were that the Browns preferred Cam Ward and perhaps aren’t high enough on Shedeur Sanders to pick him second overall. That might be a smokescreen, but Sanders isn’t widely considered that caliber of prospect anyway. Cousins has always made the most sense among the veteran options projected to be available this offseason — assuming the Falcons are not serious about making him the most expensive backup the league has ever seen — for a couple reasons.

The biggest: Kevin Stefanski was Cousins’ quarterbacks coach and offensive coordinator with the Vikings for a couple years before the Browns hired him. Cousins is coming off a career-worst year (18 touchdowns, 16 interceptions) but it was his first season post-Achilles surgery, and he dealt with other injuries too. He’s definitely on the decline but is a perfectly serviceable bridge option, whether that’s to Sanders or if Cleveland takes a swing later in the draft on someone like Milroe. The former Alabama star is more of a project as a passer but is a legitimate weapon as a runner; Stefanski can incorporate him into the gameplan as a rookie.

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Giants: Aaron Rodgers and Jaxson Dart

The Rodgers-to-Giants possibility first became public once Stafford officially returned to the Rams, but there was buzz about the team’s interest in the 41-year-old all week during the combine. The Giants are exploring all veteran options, but the reality is that Rodgers is probably the best one, depending on their mileage on Darnold (who will be far more expensive than Rodgers).

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From New York’s perspective, it’s a win-now desperation play for a general manager on the hot seat. Rodgers still has enough ability to serve as an inexpensive bridge option for a rookie, even if he experienced a steep decline in 2024 as he battled injuries, struggled to move around the pocket, was unwilling to take shots downfield and caused his fair share of drama. Even still, he was far better than any quarterback the Giants trotted out in 2024, and contrary to popular belief, Rodgers was viewed positively by the majority of the Jets’ locker room. Rodgers is more willing to tutor a young quarterback than many might realize, even if that plan failed with Zach Wilson. From Rodgers’ perspective, he might not have a better option than the Giants. He also recently bought a house in New Jersey and might not be eager to move unless an opportunity opened up in his home state (California). It would be a fair assumption to say that both Davante Adams and Allen Lazard would follow Rodgers to the Giants too.

The Giants could consider Sanders if he falls to No. 3, but the smarter play would be to load up with talent elsewhere on the roster. As for Dart: The Giants are flush with draft capital, with early second-, third- and fourth-round picks, plus an extra fourth. Dart seems to be the consensus third-best prospect at the moment, and some teams even have him ahead of Sanders. The Giants might be able to snag him at the top of the second round, but if not it wouldn’t be difficult for them to trade back up into the first round and get him — and then let him learn from Rodgers for a year.

Colts: Sam Darnold and Anthony Richardson

It was always going to be hard for Richardson to come back from checking himself out of a game due to fatigue. He has tantalizing tools but has not shown an ability to be a consistent, starting-caliber NFL quarterback yet, and the members of Colts leadership (particularly GM Chris Ballard) are on the hot seat. I wouldn’t even rule out a team calling the Colts about trading for Richardson, though his value is pretty low for someone drafted fifth overall two years ago.

Ballard, somehow, is getting another shot at finding a quality starting quarterback. Darnold is the top free agent available coming off a stellar 2024: 4,319 yards, 35 touchdowns and 12 interceptions. PFF projects Darnold to get a contract worth more than $40 million a year, so the Colts would be banking on him playing like he did before poor performances in regular-season-finale and wild-card-playoff losses.

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Jets: Justin Fields and Tyrod Taylor

Taylor is on the Jets’ roster at a reasonable rate ($6.8 million cap hit) and it would not be shocking at all if he wound up being Aaron Glenn’s Week 1 starter. But there has been a lot of buzz about the prospect of the Jets going after Fields and it makes some sense — he’s young (25), mobile and might have some untapped potential, even if he’s been inconsistent as a thrower in the NFL. He was off to a nice start in Pittsburgh last year before they ultimately opted to bench him for Russell WIlson.

The most likely outcome for Fields this summer is that a team like the Jets gives him a one- or two-year prove-it type deal loaded with incentives, which would give him a shot at a bigger payday (a la Darnold) in a year or two. Fields has a history with Jets wide receiver Garrett Wilson (they played together at Ohio State) and New York will have the cap space to sign him if they’re bidding against other teams — which sounds like a real possibility. PFF projects a one-year, $11 million deal but I think it will wind up taking more than that.

Signing Fields won’t preclude the Jets from taking a shot on a Day 2 or Day 3 quarterback prospect. My early prediction: Ohio State’s Will Howard or Syracuse’s Kyle McCord.

Raiders: Russell Wilson and Quinn Ewers

The Raiders were viewed as having a real shot at Stafford, largely because of the presence of Tom Brady. Most signs point toward the Raiders prioritizing proven veterans over unproven rookies, or even question marks like Fields or Darnold. Wilson is probably the next-best veteran on the market after Rodgers, and there are a lot of fun storylines that would come with him going to Las Vegas: He’d reunite with coach Pete Carroll and join forces with Brady, who Wilson lost to in Super Bowl XLIX.

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The Raiders also have an early second-round pick (No. 37), and two early thirds (No. 68 and No. 73) and would be smart to add a developmental talent, like Ewers, after the first round.

Saints: Derek Carr and Shedeur Sanders

The Saints don’t really have much of an avenue to improve this position and might be stuck with Carr for now. New Orleans is already $47 million over the cap and wouldn’t get much relief by cutting Carr pre-June 1 ($1.3 million), and he’s unlikely to garner any trade interest at this point. So the Saints are more likely to just roll with him for one more year.

That wouldn’t preclude them from drafting someone. I think it’s conceivable at this point that Sanders drops out of the Top 5; he would offer the Saints a way out of the quarterback purgatory they’ve found themselves in since Drew Brees retired. If Sanders falls to No. 9 and the Saints are high enough on him, it’s worth taking the swing.

Seahawks: Geno Smith

The Seahawks will stay the course with Smith for at least one more season. He’s proven to be a perfectly capable, if inconsistent, quarterback at this stage of his career. Over the last three seasons he’s averaged 4,242 passing yards and threw 71 touchdowns and 35 interceptions — with 15 picks coming in 2024, the most since his rookie year with the Jets. He might have some value if the Seahawks opt to go in another direction, especially since they’d save $31 million in cap space by trading him, but I don’t see that happening.

Steelers: Daniel Jones and Tyler Shough

I’ll be honest, I had the hardest time predicting what Pittsburgh does. There is a lot of noise about the Steelers preferring to keep either Fields or Wilson, but that was also the noise about Mason Rudolph and Kenny Pickett last year and that didn’t exactly come to fruition. I think Fields will ultimately choose between the Jets and Steelers — and keep in mind that Pittsburgh benched him last season even though he was playing relatively well. If Pittsburgh brings him back while committing to him as a starter, though, that could give them the edge.

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I ultimately decided to go with the Jets for Fields, but it’s a close call. As for who Pittsburgh winds up targeting if not Fields? I considered Cousins and Rodgers here, but Cleveland and New York just make more sense for both at the moment. I don’t think the Steelers will pick a quarterback in the first round. Jones would be an interesting low-cost flier, as he could be a good fit in Arthur Smith’s run-heavy offense, and Pittsburgh would be the best environment he’s been in as a starter in terms of culture, coaching and talent around him. Pairing Jones with a developmental Day 2 or Day 3 prospect would be a way of taking two shots at finding a starter — and Shough has some intriguing potential because of his size (6-5) and athleticism, though he has an injury history and will be 26 in the fall.

If the Saints do wind up moving on from Carr, he becomes a real possibility here too. I could also see Pittsburgh bringing in a third veteran quarterback to be part of the conversation — someone of the Carson Wentz, Jimmy Garoppolo, Jameis Winston, Gardner Minshew ilk.

Titans: Cam Ward

There’s been a lot of assumption that the Titans will trade out of the No. 1 pick to accumulate more assets. Has anyone ever stopped to ask why they wouldn’t just take the top quarterback prospect themselves? Will Levis is clearly not the answer. There are no other obvious solutions for a team that’s not quite a contender yet. And Ward at least has the potential to be something special, even if he’s not a surefire prospect like past No. 1 picks. The Titans have some pieces already in place to help him, including talented running backs (Tony Pollard, Tyjae Spears), a wide receiver (Calvin Ridley) and a couple first-round offensive linemen (JC Latham, Peter Skoronski). Maybe the Titans don’t view Ward as a potential franchise quarterback — or perhaps they value the potential of someone like Abdul Carter or Travis Hunter more. It’s certainly possible the Titans wind up trading out of this pick, but that’s far from a lock.

Vikings: J.J. McCarthy and Carson Wentz

For a while, the prospect of bringing Darnold back for another year while McCarthy works his way back from a torn meniscus seemed like a legitimate possibility. But as time as passed, and Darnold struggled in two big games, that began to feel less likely. Minnesota is very high on McCarthy’s potential, which he flashed in training camp and the preseason last year.

If Jones doesn’t get a starting shot elsewhere I think he’ll return to the Vikings as a potential stopgap until McCarthy is ready. But if not him, I still anticipate the Vikings adding a playable veteran at the position — I considered both Wentz and Jimmy Garoppolo here. I went with Wentz because, to me, he fits the Darnold mold of a former highly drafted quarterback seeking redemption. Wentz was an MVP frontrunner in 2017 before tearing his ACL. He had moments in both Indianapolis and Washington, but stints with both teams ended poorly. He’s been humbled as a backup the past two seasons, learning behind Matthew Stafford and Patrick Mahomes and from both Sean McVay and Andy Reid. If there’s a coach who can get something out of Wentz, it’s Kevin O’Connell.

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(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; Photos: Rich von Biberstein / Icon Sportswire, Luke Hales, Kevin C. Cox / Getty Images)

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Book Review: ‘The Trouble of Color,’ by Martha S. Jones

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Book Review: ‘The Trouble of Color,’ by Martha S. Jones

THE TROUBLE OF COLOR: An American Family Memoir, by Martha S. Jones


When Martha S. Jones was a student at SUNY New Paltz, she took a course called “Black Sociology” with Prof. James Bowen. It was the mid-1970s, and the first Black studies department, founded at San Francisco State University at the height of 1960s student protests, was less than a decade old. As part of the first generation of African-descended young people to engage with Black culture and history in the college classroom, Jones was excited for all that Bowen’s class could offer. Despite her fair skin and “hair too limp” (her words), she relished the chance to become “sisters of the skin” with her classmates.

Rather than camaraderie, however, Jones experienced a humiliating confrontation while giving an oral presentation on Frantz Fanon’s book “A Dying Colonialism.” Looking back on the incident in her consummately readable, lyrically rendered new memoir, “The Trouble of Color,” Jones, an award-winning professor and gifted historian at Johns Hopkins University, acknowledges that her Blackness was not the same as Fanon’s. “Fanon came of age in colonized Martinique and then through military service and medical training,” she writes. “Instead, my self-discovery began in that cinder-block and linoleum upstate New York classroom.”

Anxious to please and struggling through her first attempt at public speaking, Jones gave a mechanical recitation of Fanon’s work, inciting protest from her classmates. One of the most vocal critics was Ron, a “suitably brilliant, handsome and outspokenly confident” student, who scoffed, “Enough of this. We shouldn’t have to listen to this. She doesn’t even know where the French Antilles are.”

Jones, the author of multiple, field-defining works of African American history, understands this painful moment as a consequence of adolescent racial gatekeeping, predicated on the other students’ assumptions about her Blackness. But as an 18-year-old, she attempted to deflect the accusation of racial inauthenticity by saying, “Well … the French Antilles are in France.”

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She eventually befriended Ron but never forgot what he spat at her: “Who do you think you are?”

“The Trouble of Color” is an attempt to answer this question through a sophisticated analysis of race using Jones’s own family history as a prism, while implicitly arguing for the centrality of Black women scholars in the historical profession.

Jones’s paternal grandfather was David Dallas Jones (1887-1956), a North Carolina native, graduate of Wesleyan University and president of Bennett College, in Greensboro, N.C., now one of only two all-women H.B.C.U.s in the United States (Spelman College, in Atlanta, is the other). Jones knew him as “Grandy,” although he died before she was born.

The affectionate nickname belies David Jones’s significance. Under his presidency, Bennett, founded in 1873, became known as the “Vassar of the South,” a place where Black women, the children and grandchildren of enslaved people, obtained a rigorous liberal arts education in defiance of cultural expectations. Alumnae include Belinda Foster, North Carolina’s first Black woman district attorney; Carolyn Payton, the first Black woman head of the Peace Corps; and Gladys A. Robinson, a North Carolina state senator.

Martha Jones’s father, David Dallas Jones Jr., along with his siblings and kin, grew up within the segregated yet racially proud world of Bennett College, and the stories she heard about ancestors, enslaved and free, who navigated the 20th-century color line shaped her subsequent scholarship.

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“The Trouble of Color” is a pointed rebuttal to those who still insist that enslaved peoples’ histories are unknowable, or that Black people cannot be trusted as narrators of their own past. In a moving passage at the beginning of the book, Jones describes her frustration during the 1980s and ’90s when, reviewing literature in the nascent field of Black women’s history, she uncovered secondary sources that whitewashed her family’s past. One source mistook her grandfather for white, an inference presumably derived from photos depicting his light complexion.

Another source, a scholar of the civil rights movement, misspelled the name of Susie W. Jones, David Dallas Jones’s wife and Martha’s beloved grandmother Musie, whom he’d interviewed for his book — an error as grating for Jones as it is for many Black women who have routinely been misnamed or decredentialed, either deliberately or in ignorance.

As Martha Jones puts it, “I boiled with outrage, and one of Musie’s stories came immediately to mind: In the Jim Crow years, she’d battled local white people to be addressed by her preferred name — ‘Mrs. Jones’ — rather than the overly familiar ‘Susie’ or the demeaning ‘Gal.’ For people like my grandmother, what they were called mattered.”

Jones’s account of these errors is particularly poignant coming at a time when a respected scholar and the first Black woman president of Harvard University can be dismissed as an incompetent “diversity hire.” Black women’s history, Jones insists, is vital for those who want to honor the generations of Black people who paved the way for our current achievements.

Although she never says so explicitly, Jones’s compelling descriptions of reading the archives, accompanied by images from the archives themselves, make clear that she understands the central role Black women historians have played in disrupting an academy that, like much of the world, constantly demands that we prove ourselves.

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At one point, Jones recounts a visit to Oxmoor Farm, in Louisville, Ky., in search of traces of her oldest known ancestor.

Here Jones is at her analytical best, as she relates her ancestor Nancy Bell Graves’s enslavement to Martha Fry Bell, the wife of a Danville, Ky., merchant. After a dogged search, Jones unearths records of Nancy and her husband, Edmund, in the papers of a white professor and enslaver, Ormond Beatty. She discovers that Nancy had at least two sisters, Tinah and Betty — their names listed in holdings at Centre College in Danville that, according to the confident local archivist, contained no traces of Jones’s family.

This find leads Jones to the Filson Historical Society in Louisville and then to Oxmoor Farm, where she is struck by the decadence of a house museum maintained on the grounds where her ancestors were possibly enslaved. Jones enters Oxmoor in a state of high emotion, but she is comforted by the words of the historian Nell Irvin Painter, who advises colleagues to “remember the blood on the page” — a mantra that Jones, in a heartbreaking scene, repeats to herself as she searches for evidence of Nancy’s kin at Oxmoor. The experience is a reminder, she writes, that “the documents I sometimes read, though neat and elegantly scripted, had their origins in brutal force.”

In “The Trouble of Color,” Jones has done more than honor her family’s history; she reinscribes their story on the tablet of our collective imagination. On Jan. 4, Thavolia Glymph, a historian at Duke University, delivered her final address as president of the American Historical Association. Like Jones, Glymph is a towering figure in her field, part of the cadre of Black women scholars who inform so much of Jones’s work. In her speech, Glymph, the first Black woman to head the A.H.A., argued against popular assumptions, both within and outside the academy, that the stories of America’s enslaved people can never be told, and that the archive, as we have traditionally understood it, cannot be relied upon to reveal the intricacies of Black life.

“The archive of slavery is not a black hole,” Glymph said. “The desires of slaveholders are not of such density and gravity that the voices of enslaved people cannot be heard. This is not the archive of the enslaved with which I work. The archive I have, and that we have, is one in which enslaved people speak, loudly, and act with intention.”

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At a time when Black history is under attack, Glymph asks us to recognize that those histories we deny or deem unknowable are everywhere in the historical record — precisely what Jones’s beautiful memoir confirms.


THE TROUBLE OF COLOR: An American Family Memoir | By Martha S. Jones | Basic Books | 314 pp. | $30

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