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Rotimi Adeoye

@_rotimia

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@nytopinion editorial board
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Writing a book on the American Dream for Harper Collins: WHITE PICKET FENCES
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Some personal news: I’m joining @nytopinion as an opinion writer for the editorial board. I’m incredibly grateful to everyone who has read, watched, shared, challenged, and supported my work along the way. I’m excited to keep writing — and making videos — about politics, the economy, and the forces shaping our lives. A new chapter starts today. Please share this and follow along. #news #journalism #newjob #politics by @_rotimia
139
8 days ago
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“History has failed us, but no matter.” In D.C., I had a patio overlooking New Hampshire Ave where I’d sit drinking cheap, terrible whiskey, reading, and listening to Drake’s “U With Me?” on repeat. I found those words in Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko and carried them long after closing the book. The pandemic was ending, and I was leaving a city and friends I loved. A trip to Nigeria years earlier had unsettled me: the distance between people’s ambitions and their circumstances. Meanwhile, my life was starting to resemble the success my parents crossed an ocean hoping I’d find. I knew how easily things could have gone differently. I was consumed with “making it,” unsure what that meant or why I’d let it define my life. I thought about my family’s sacrifices and people who did everything they were told would lead to a better life, only to find the promise unfulfilled. Somewhere in those thoughts, I imagined a book about the American Dream. My fiancée, Harper, urged me to write it. She read every draft and believed when I couldn’t. Friends offered encouragement and honest criticism. I pitched agents and received 67 rejections (pic 3). I wondered whether I’d mistaken a feeling for a book, but couldn’t let it go. Now, somehow, WHITE PICKET FENCES will be published by Mariner Books at HarperCollins. It follows three Pennsylvania families, including mine, pursuing the American Dream through work, education, and ownership, asking what happens when doing everything right no longer promises a better life. It’s about ordinary people, the heroes of everyday life whose love, sacrifices, and stubborn hope deserve a place in history. To my mother, sister, and family, thank you for the love and sacrifices that shaped my life. Thank you to @yorkelaura who believed in a stranger online; @rakiathegreat , who trusted me with this story; my friends, who made it better; and @harper__garfinkle , who never stopped telling me to write. I love you. And to you, the reader, if there’s something you can’t stop thinking about making, give it a chance. The world may say no, but don’t let that be the only voice you hear. There’s so much to write and learn. I hope I do right by them. by @_rotimia
45
5 days ago
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Some fun personal news: I’ve joined @nytimes as a contributing opinion writer. My first piece is on housing, arguing the federal government needs to completely reorient itself, like it did with the GI Bill, to help working Americans buy their first home by 30. Thanks to @samdeutsch and @tahrahoops for talking to me about the idea. Read more at the link in my bio. by @_rotimia
94
6 months ago
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What happens when AI starts doing the work that teaches you how to do your job? Entry-level jobs aren’t just about a paycheck, but also they’re how we build the next generation of experienced workers. And AI could be disrupting that entire process. #artificialintelligence #entryleveljobs #futureofwork #jobmarket by @_rotimia
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3 days ago
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Outside is back to what is was, you what I’m sayin’? by @_rotimia
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23 days ago
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Excited to announce I’ll be speaking at the @phillyabj emerging media diversity convention in October, join us if you can! Tickets can be purchased at www.thepabj.org by @_rotimia
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2 months ago
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Every Fourth of July, I try to write something about America. Usually it runs in a paper I’m contributing to or in my newsletter. This year’s busier than most, but I couldn’t let the day pass without a few words. It’s easy right now to not feel patriotic. The last several years have felt unfair, unyielding, exhausting in a way that makes the moral arc bending toward justice feel like something you have to take on faith. But look at America next to other nations, past and present, and the story gets more complicated than that feeling accounts for. Set America’s history of slavery next to the subjugation carried out on other continents long before Europeans arrived, and no country comes out blameless. The trans-Saharan slave trade moved Africans into the Middle East for a thousand years before the first ship crossed the Atlantic. In the Andes, the Inca ran the mita, forced labor that conscripted subject populations to work mines and build roads for an empire they had no say in joining. None of that erases what America did, and it doesn’t mean we forget. Subjugation has never been an American failure alone, it’s a human evil. What makes America’s case distinct isn’t that slavery existed here, it’s that a country built on the language of liberty and equality had to reckon with the gap between what it claimed and what it practiced. I recently read Harvey Kaye’s book on Thomas Paine, and it struck me how the founding era, for all its flaws, grasped something rare. They built a country around an idea rather than blood or soil, and wrote self-correction into the design itself. Most founding stories don’t leave room for a country to argue with its own premise, this one does. The most patriotic thing a person can do is criticize the country they love and hold it to what it claims to be. People who faced conditions far harder still chose to carry this flag forward. That should give us pause before we hand it to someone else, whether that be a political party or a president, just because carrying it doesn’t feel good today. “May the wings of liberty never lose a feather.” May we keep carrying that star spangled banner, even when it’s hard to. Happy 250th 🇺🇸 by @_rotimia
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3 months ago
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I’m a legal eagle 🦅 by @_rotimia
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4 months ago
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My latest essay with @nytopinion exposes a troubling pattern: rural America is being carved up in secret. A Kentucky family was offered $26 million for their farmland for AI infrastructure—10 times what the land was worth—but the company used NDAs to hide what it was actually building from everyone else in the county. A Pennsylvania township supervisor learned his community’s largest commercial property was being turned into a 7,500-person ICE detention facility only after the federal government had already bought it. Population of Tremont: 300. Rural communities are facing two new problems: data centers and detention centers—and Congress needs to require transparency before either is built. Gift link in bio. by @_rotimia
94
5 months ago
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New {link in bio}: I started American Pursuit, a Substack focused on the details behind the big picture—how policy actually works and what we should build next in criminal justice, immigration, housing, and the economy. My first piece tackles ICE and immigration enforcement, offering a specific alternative to an immigration system that’s both ineffective and inhumane. Link in bio to read and subscribe. Photo credits: Chicago Sun Times by @_rotimia
43
a year ago
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jeez louise 😮‍💨 by @_rotimia
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a year ago
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Nothing beats a ✈️2️⃣ holiday by @_rotimia
4
a year ago
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