Donovan Ramsey
Los Angeles
As seen in:
Medium,
The New York Times,
Yahoo Entertainment,
Yahoo Life,
HuffPost,
Scribd,
Yahoo News,
BuzzFeed,
Daily Pilot,
Los Angeles Times
and
Covers:
personal finance, science, arts, polititcs, entertainment, culture, race, lifestlye, policy, education, long-form, breaking news
Doesn't Cover:
sports
BIG ME.
Articles by Donovan Ramsey
Captive Audience
Take It From the Top — Derrick Adams, 2015. A famous person is online at three in the morning, posting with the frightening productivity of someone whose body has recently declared sleep optional. They have uploaded nineteen videos in forty-five minutes. Their pupils are negotiating separate treaties. Every sentence begins in one ZIP code and ends in another. The first people to arrive make jokes.
Columbia, where the South drops the act
You don’t go to Columbia for charm or spectacle. You go for the friction: bronze stars on the State House, ribs that defy Instagram and a raw calm carved from stubborn ground. If Charleston is the South dressed up for company, Columbia is what you catch when the South is in sweatpants at home. It’s not a city that tries to seduce you with facades or curated charm. It doesn’t need to. Columbia is a liminal space: between the rural and the urban, between a bloody past and a restless present.
Birmingham is for lovers
People come to Birmingham carrying a heavy script. They arrive expecting the gravity of the place to crush them. They expect the brick, the blood, the sermons and the steel. They treat the city like a crime scene or a classroom, a place you visit to pay respects to the struggle, to touch the scars of 1963. They are not wrong. That spirit is there. But often, the visitors miss the point of venerating it. They forget what the struggle was actually for.
Revival as a way of life in Charlotte
Charlotte looks like money. A city of polished glass and bank towers. A football stadium glowing blue at dusk. For so many, that’s all they ever see: the shiny surface, the hustle, the brand. But if you look closer — if you listen — you’ll find Charlotte’s enduring spirit of revival. The city is a vessel for the sacred and the profane, something born under a canvas tent where Sweet Daddy Grace’s shout bands made hymns swing toward jazz.
Birmingham is for lovers
Travel Beyond its storied Civil Rights past, Birmingham unfolds as a city of slow mornings, generous tables and landscapes that reward those willing to linger. Adios is a Mexican-inspired cocktail bar on 1st Avenue North in downtown Birmingham. (Bob Miller for the AJC) By Donovan X. Ramsey – For the AJC Updated March 26, 2026 People come to Birmingham carrying a heavy script. They arrive expecting the gravity of the place to crush them. They expect the brick, the blood, the sermons and the steel.
Revival as a way of life in Charlotte
Travel From intimate gatherings over soul food or cockails to block parties, the city renews itself through the simple act of coming together. Uptown Yolk is a popular destination in Charlotte, N.C., for visitors and locals, with a menu that elevates comfort food and an aesthetic that sets it apart. (Travis Dove for the AJC) By Donovan X. Ramsey – For the AJC Updated March 26, 2026 Charlotte looks like money. A city of polished glass and bank towers. A football stadium glowing blue at dusk.
How Designer Charles Harbison Is Redefining American Fashion
Charles Harbison designs clothes that are beautiful on the surface but rigorous underneath. They seduce, then reveal intelligence. Every seam is an argument, every color a citation. His collections may look romantic, but they are built like ideas — structures meant to hold emotion and meaning in equal measure.
Hip Hop Belongs at the Table — When Understood as an Ingredient — Resy | Right This Way
Discover restaurants to love. The Hit List The Hit List For all your restaurant recommendation needs, look no further than the Resy Hit List, our monthly list of 10 spots that should be on your radar right now. Read More › The 10 Restaurants That Defined Atlanta Dining in 2025 The Resy Hit List: Where In Atlanta You’ll Want to Eat Right Now The Resy Hit List: Where In Atlanta You’ll Want to Eat in Oct.
Columbia, where the South drops the act
Patti O’Furniture talks with people at Boyd Plaza during the Arts and Draughts event at the Columbia Museum of Art on Saturday, Nov. 21, 2025. The veteran drag queen led tours of the Keith Haring exhibit during the museum’s biannual block party with live music, D.I.Y. art projects, scavenger hunts, art tours, and beer. (Sean Rayford for the AJC) () By Donovan X. Ramsey – For the AJC Updated March 26, 2026 You don’t go to Columbia for charm or spectacle.
The Loud Truth Behind Quiet Dismissals
A quiet storm has settled over the American criminal justice system – one that doesn’t announce itself with a gavel or a jury verdict, but with the rustle of a file being closed. Dismissals. On the surface, they suggest justice has prevailed. But for those who’ve lived through it, they reveal something more troubling: a system that punishes before it proves, detains before it decides, and coerces outcomes long before a trial begins. Karima knows that story intimately.
Jail Is Not Mental Health Care
Politicians are once again using fear of crime and mental illness to attack bail reform. But the real crisis isn’t reform – it’s that jails have quietly become America’s largest mental health institutions. At The Bail Project, we see this crisis every day: people in psychiatric distress are arrested instead of helped, locked in cells instead of treated, and often leave in worse condition – if they make it out at all.
I Was Never a Monster
Rudolph had overdosed so many times that local paramedics were on a first-name basis with him. “They’d say, ‘Rudy again?’” he recalls. “I was just that guy.” But in April 2023, lying in a hospital bed with rotting legs and a warrant hanging over his head, something shifted. “I got up off the ground,” he says. “That was the day I decided I was done.” Rudolph’s story is not just one of recovery from addiction.
A Bail, A Break, A Beginning
The cycle of addiction and incarceration can feel inescapable, a revolving door where the past is always waiting to pull you back in. For Max, a 36-year-old Arizona native, that door had spun twice already. He had been to prison twice, and each time, he returned to a world that seemed to offer more obstacles than opportunities. But after his most recent arrest, a different kind of opportunity arose – one that offered not just a way out of jail, but a path to a completely new life.
"They Said I Didn't Look Disabled"
Amanda says she had to crawl up the steps of the jail transport bus on her knees. She couldn’t walk unassisted – rheumatoid arthritis had twisted her joints – but no one offered help. The guards, she said, weren’t allowed to. So she dropped to her knees, gripping the stairs with what little strength she had in her left arm. She was on her way to Estrella Jail in Phoenix. What followed was more than a month in jail, where Amanda says her condition was ignored by jail staff.
Q&A: Can We Stop Jailing People in Crisis?
Caitlin Garbo: That it only affects “those people.” Mental illness can touch anyone at any time. It’s not just about folks who are unhoused or visibly in crisis. We need to stop othering people and start seeing them as just that – people – with lives and needs and potential. Daliah Heller: That mental illness is a personal failure. That someone’s symptoms mean they’re dangerous or broken. We miss the context: trauma, poverty, systemic neglect.
From the Streets to Sanctuary
Latandra walks in grace now. At just 36 years old, she is a woman who’s overcome much. Today, she’s a year clean and living with purpose in Pensacola, Florida, where she’s completing a faith-based reentry program that she credits with saving her life. But the road here was hard. “I’ve been in shootouts, I’ve had bullets miss me and hit the person standing in front of me.” “I’ve been in shootouts, I’ve had bullets miss me and hit the person standing in front of me,” Latandra says.
She Got Sober. Then the Charges Came.
Caleigh did everything we say people should do to rebuild their lives: she was sober, working at a car wash, and caring for her newborn son. After years of addiction, her life was finally stabilizing. Then came a knock at the door. “I had already gotten sober and had a baby.” “They were old drug charges,” Caleigh said. “I had already gotten sober and had a baby.
The Long Road to Fatherhood
Robert Brown doesn’t flinch when he talks about the past. He tells the story of his life the way you might describe an old scar: clear-eyed, without self-pity, but unmistakably marked by pain. It’s late spring when we connect, a few weeks before Father’s Day, and he’s at home in Indianapolis, where three generations now live under one roof. His daughter and her toddler son share the space with him and his wife. They laugh, hang out, and fuss sometimes. “It’s loud,” he says, smiling.
He Lost the Beat, Not the Rhythm
In jail, surrounded by noise but deprived of music, Noel felt the silence most deeply. For a man whose life had once revolved around rhythm, the absence of sound was its own kind of punishment. “Not being able to just get it off my back by sitting down at my drums and playing for a while,” he said. “That was hard.” “I ended up with a good career for a pretty long time… I toured all over the world.” Noel grew up in New Orleans, which he describes as a music city.
Leaving Wasn’t the End of Her Struggle. It Was the Beginning.
Angela grew up in a big, loving family “where cousins treated each other like siblings and someone was always ready to help out in an emergency.” But she’s also known profound hardship. Both of her parents died when she was a teenager. She was diagnosed with diabetes as a child. And, she says, she spent more than a decade in an abusive relationship. We often imagine survival as a finish line – that once someone escapes harm, the worst is behind them.
Lil Rel Howery on His 5-Year Mind, Body, & Soul Transformation Original
FOR LIL REL HOWERY, the journey to fitness began not in the gym but in a theater, at the 2017 premiere of Get Out, the Oscar-winning thriller in which he costarred. Watching himself on-screen, he thought, Did I get that big? It wasn’t just about his appearance; it was a realization that his health had quietly taken a back seat. I gotta figure this out, Howery, now 45, remembers thinking. On a recent Zoom call from his home in L.A., he looks like the picture of a guy who’s put in the work.
How Colman Domingo Found the Courage to Bloom
In the quiet, sun-soaked expanse ofPalm Springs, Colman Domingo found a rare moment of stillness. He and his husband, Raul, had just checked into a hotel for a weekend getaway when his phone rang. It was Bruce Cohen, producer of Rustin, calling with news Domingo had been waiting for. “That’s literally where I got the call inviting me to play Bayard Rustin and to lead the film,” Domingo recalls. The timing felt almost spiritual. “It felt divine, actually. Good things happen here,” he says.
Amid Debates Over Black History, a Park Stands For Truth and Reconciliation
M y recent trip to Montgomery, Alabama, wasn’t my first visit. I had previously explored the city and the sites associated with Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) in 2019, in what turned out to be a pivotal moment — after Donald Trump’s ascent to power, but before the Covid-19 pandemic brought the world to a standstill. It was also before the 2020 killing of George Floyd sparked widespread protests and a year of reconstruction.
Amid Debates Over Black History, a Park Stands For Truth and Reconciliation
My recent trip to Montgomery, Alabama, wasn’t my first visit. I had previously explored the city and the sites associated with Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) in 2019, in what turned out to be a pivotal moment — after Donald Trump’s ascent to power, but before the Covid-19 pandemic brought the world to a standstill. It was also before the 2020 killing of George Floyd sparked widespread protests and a year of reconstruction.
A "This Day" Books & Merch Gift Guide...
Hey everyone, I hope you had a great Thanksgiving break. It is book-buying season. Booksellers and authors make an enormous portion of their profit in these weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas. They can use your support. So, in that spirit I just put together a booklist of all the authors we featured on the show in 2023. (Plus Niki and Kellie’s latest books of course) I used bookshop.org, but you can of course go track it down at your favorite bookseller, online or in the real world.
‘American Fiction’ director Cord Jefferson on the agony and ecstasy of being a writer in Hollywood today
‘American Fiction’ director Cord Jefferson on the agony and ecstasy of being a writer in Hollywood today By Donovan X. Ramsey Cord Jefferson writes to keep from raging. After getting his start in journalism writing about identity and relationships for publications like The New York Times Magazine and editing hot takes at Gawker, he began channeling his ire about race and other social delusions into film and TV work.
‘American Fiction’ director Cord Jefferson on the agony and ecstasy of being a writer in Hollywood today
By Donovan X. Ramsey8 minute Read Cord Jefferson writes to keep from raging. After getting his start in journalism writing about identity and relationships for publications like The New York Times Magazine and editing hot takes at Gawker, he began channeling his ire about race and other social delusions into film and TV work.
Page 4172 of 5215 - The Buzz Cincy - Cincinnati Ohio's Talk Radio Station
#YourLifeMatters Hangout: How Does Colorism Affect Your Self Esteem? [Join The Conversation!] Oscar winner and Hollywood’s new “It” girl Lupita Nyong’o is helping to change how we view beauty. In the latest #YourLifeMatters Google Hangout, we will host an… GOP Has 60% Chance To Take Back the Senate? Data journalist Nate Silver predicted the 2012 Presidential outcomes in every state.
Agents of Chaos
The life and times of High Times’ enigmatic founder Thomas King Forçade, an underground newspaper editor and marijuana kingpin who—between police raids, smuggling runs, and outrageous stunts—battled both the US government and fellow radicals. At the end of the 1960s, the mysterious Tom Forçade suddenly appeared, insinuating himself into the top echelons of countercultural politics and assuming control of the Underground Press Syndicate, a coalition of newspapers across the country.
The Blind Side: Part 2
NBC Action 5 News: Denise Oher shares her side of 'The Blind Side' When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era Hardcover The Cringest Scene from the Movie The Blind Side
Mischievous Creatures: The Forgotten Sisters Who Transformed Early American Science
Catherine McNeur. Basic, $32.50 (432p) ISBN 978-1-541-67417-2 Historian McNeur (Taming Manhattan) paints a vibrant portrait of botanist Elizabeth Carrington Morris and her younger sister, entomologist Margaretta Hare Morris, restoring the women to their rightful place in the history of science. Born in the 1790s to a well-to-do family, the sisters grew up in Philadelphia, where they conducted scientific observations and wrote up the findings from their family home.
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2023
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2023 New York Times columnist Zimmer (Life’s Edge) brings together 20 captivating pieces of science journalism that find reason for hope amid despair. One among several essays focusing on Covid-19, Elizabeth Svoboda’s “An Invisible Epidemic” discusses the guilt suffered by healthcare workers who feel they provided inadequate care for Covid patients as hospitals became overwhelmed.
Our Secret Society: Mollie Moon and the Glamour, Money, and Power Behind the Civil Rights Movement
Tanisha Ford. Amistad, $32.99 (388p) ISBN 978-0-063-11571-2 Historian Ford (Liberated Threads) sets forth a riveting portrait of the “doyenne of Harlem society,” Mollie Lewis Moon (1907–1990), charting her rise from “leftist social worker to famed African American fundraiser.” Born into poverty in Hattiesburg, Miss., Mollie’s family eventually relocated to Gary, Ind., where she briefly worked as a pharmacist. She moved to Harlem in 1930 and became politically active in leftist causes.
How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World
Deb Chachra. Riverhead, $29 (320p) ISBN 978-0-593-08659-9 Materials scientist Chachra reminds readers of the ubiquity, endurance, and necessity of infrastructural networks while enthusiastically arguing for their public funding in her insightful debut.
How Dr. Dre and Hip Hop Helped End the Crack Era
4 hours ago What’s it like to get absolutely baked and attend everything from a client pitching meeting to a funeral? The Benefits The Drawbacks What Do The Functional Stoners Feel I smoke a joint when I wake up around 7 am. By the time I leave, I have made another one and I usually smoke it on the way to work, …
How Dr. Dre and Hip Hop Helped End the Crack Era Original
My community was in the middle of an invisible war. When people disappear from the neighborhood, I learned, it was because they’d been killed or locked up. Or even worse, they were “on that shit,” meaning they’d become addicted to crack and condemned to a life of wandering the streets like the living dead. That was the message I got when I watched “New Jack City” for the first time. An ashy-mouthed Chris Rock played “Pookie,” a young crack addict in Harlem.
If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution
Vincent Bevins. PublicAffairs, $30 (352p) ISBN 978-1-541-78897-8 The 2010s saw left-wing protest movements around the world shake the establishment, but accomplish the opposite of what they wanted, according to this elegiac history. Journalist Bevins (The Jakarta Method) explores progressive uprisings in 10 countries, most of them following a fashionable “horizontal” model that eschewed hierarchy, leaders, programmatic demands, and political negotiations with governments.
What We Meant When We Said 'Crackhead'
The crack epidemic has passed into legend since its end in the mid-1990s, and the further we get from its height, the larger it looms in the collective imagination. That’s partly a product of memory itself, it seems, but it’s also a consequence of which memories of the epidemic have been prioritized. For more than three decades, the accounts of law-enforcement officials, politicians, and pundits have dominated the conversation.
What "Crackhead" Really Meant in 1980s America
The crack epidemic has passed into legend since its end in the mid-1990s, and the further we get from its height, the larger it looms in the collective imagination. That’s partly a product of memory itself, it seems, but it’s also a consequence of which memories of the epidemic have been prioritized. For more than three decades, the accounts of law-enforcement officials, politicians, and pundits have dominated the conversation.
No such thing as a ‘crackhead’: Drawing stories and lessons from the last drug epidemic
Yes, Damien Chazelle’s love-letter to Hollywood is over three hours long, but it does zip by in a hectic cavalcade of colourful excess. While it might be empty calories and gratuitous especially in the nudity department, fast food (once in a while) is fun, no? Carrying on the fast food analogy, continued consumption could make you sick and there is much in Babylon that could make you nauseous, including projectile vomiting and hawking great gobs of saliva (ugh).
After the Murder
Donovan X. Ramsey grew up in Columbus, Ohio, in the early 1990s. What policy and media makers labeled “the crack epidemic” unfolded around him, not in abstract statistics or through threats of moral panic, but in the homes and lives of his neighbors. In his home, crack was an open but undiscussed secret; “it was like growing up in a steel town where nobody talked about steel,” he writes in When Crack Was King. The rest of the country, or at least its white media, was in a moral panic.
After the Murder
Aftermath of a riot in Washington, D.C., following Martin Luther King, Jr.'s funeral in 1968. Photography by Warren K. Leffler, via the Library of Congress. Donovan X. Ramsey grew up in Columbus, Ohio, in the early 1990s. What policy and media makers labeled “the crack epidemic” unfolded around him, not in abstract statistics or through threats of moral panic, but in the homes and lives of his neighbors.
15 must-read books coming summer 2023 (and beyond)
Summer is about more than beach reads. Don’t get us wrong — there’s nothing wrong with taking something light and escapist to your favorite oceanside spot, but it’s also perfectly fine to retreat to the darkest, most air-conditioned room you can find with a book, a glass of water (or whatever), and try to forget that triple digits are on the way. And you have a lot to choose from this summer.
When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era
Reviews "An excellent work of people-first journalism, When Crack Was King offers not only a vivid and frank history, but points to the way communities tend to save themselves even as they're being actively targeted by state policy and violence."--NPR "Drawing on intensive research and the stories of four individuals whose lives were indelibly shaped by the drug and its criminalization, Ramsey provides much-needed critique on not only drug policy past and present, but also the system that it...
7 interesting books by journalists to watch out for in 2023
Last year we wrote about how writing a book is the ultimate long-form for journalists. We wanted to take it a step further and round up some books by journalists that are either out now or will be published later this year. This is by far not an exhaustive list — just seven we thought are interesting and noteworthy to our audience. Read on (pun intended) for more.
Deion Sanders on the Big Leap to Colorado, Leaving Jackson State, and Losing Two of His Toes
We headed to the very back, to a small area cordoned off by iron rails and lit by a warm glow of spotlights. We took our seats at a table with small placard on top that read “Coach Prime.” The chef emerged from the kitchen and greeted Sanders like an old friend. He took his order personally without a menu—a turkey burger and a coffee. The rest of the diners ate catfish, pork chops, and turkey wings. My order of pork chops with rice and gravy came in a Styrofoam container with plastic utensils.
Coldest storm of the winter to hit L.A. mountains: 'You need to be prepared'
Traffic flows on Interstate 5 past snow-covered hills in Lebec, Califl, on Dec. 14, 2021. A storm could bring similar snowfall to mountain passes starting early Tuesday. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times) The coldest storm of the winter season is set to dump snow and ice to the mountains of Los Angeles County, according to an urgent advisory the National Weather Service issued Monday.
How one woman's work expanded Black vaccinations in South L.A. - Los …
Tsega Habte was so determined to recruit people to her first COVID-19 vaccination clinic that she put her personal cellphone number on the event flier. When the day finally arrived, she seemed in constant motion, bouncing from station to station, attending to volunteers, answering phone calls from strangers about the clinic targeting the East African community, switching effortlessly between English, Amharic and Tigrinya.
Southern California Edison works to restore power as strong winds subside
LOS ANGELES — As dangerous winds subsided, Southern California Edison was working Friday to restore power to thousands of customers across Los Angeles and Ventura counties. Santa Ana wind gusts peaked at 67 mph in North Hollywood and topped 80 mph in some mountain and hillside areas this week. The strong winds caused concern for critical fire weather in the region, eliciting a red flag warning from the National Weather Service and power shutoffs for nearly 64,000 homes across the region.
Larry Elder calls himself the 'Sage from South Central,' but his ties to Black LA are tenuous
LOS ANGELES — Two weeks ago, Larry Elder took Fox News' Laura Ingraham and a camera crew to his old neighborhood. The interview was promoted as a tour of South-Central L.A., but viewers didn't get scenes of the gubernatorial candidate pressing the flesh in Leimert Park, Watts or even Hyde Park where he grew up. Instead, they were treated to carefully staged shots of Elder in front of his childhood home and Crenshaw High School, his alma mater.
Show More
loading
Actions
Is this you?
As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.Get in touch with Donovan
Contact Donovan, search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.
Learn more about Muck Rack