The death of Sidney Poitier is a moment of great sadness for many, but especially for people like my parents, who remember him being the first Black actor they ever saw on TV. Raised in the Bahamas by tomato farmers, he was the youngest of seven children and came from extreme poverty. He moved to New York aged 16, where he worked as a dishwasher, took acting lessons and taught himself how to read, write and enunciate by reading newspapers and listening to the radio. He was the definition of a self-made man. When he won an Academy Award for best actor in 1964, he was the first Black person to do so. He was proud of his victory but, admirably, wasn’t blinded by it. “I don’t believe my Oscar will be a sort of magic wand that will wipe away restrictions on job opportunities for negro actors,” he said in an interview. He wasn’t wrong. It would be 38 years before another Black person (Denzel Washington) would win a best actor Oscar. Poitier’s authenticity, whether thoughtfully navigating the racial politics of Hollywood or turning down roles that he felt were typecast, made him more than just an actor, but a formidable force in setting a precedent for Black actors in leading roles. “I had to satisfy the action fans, the romantic fans, the intellectual fans. It was a terrific burden.” He was a trailblazer who carved out a path for the likes of Morgan Freeman, Whoopi Goldberg, Will Smith, to name a few. Analogue love A year ago, I was given a record player by fellow poet Malika Booker and I welcomed it with open arms. Throughout my early 20s, I bought vintage items such as typewriters and sewing machines purely for the aesthetics, but something about the pandemic and turning 30 made me wander into the wilderness of analogue. Vinyl sales in the UK took its highest market share since 1990 in 2021. As a child of Limewire, I came of age at the onset of digital streaming and I love the convenience of Spotify. But hearing Grace Jones’s 1981 album Nightclubbing on vinyl for the first time felt transcendent. Brandon Taylor recently wrote about the experience beautifully: “You can’t mistake it for some imaginary thing that comes out of the air like digital can sometimes be. With a record, you know there’s another person on the other side of the music.” I wish I had known sooner that streaming takes away so much of the ritualistic magic of music. Of course, saying: “Hey Google, play I’ve Done it Again” is an effortless act, but whenever I take a record from its sleeve, set it down and delicately lower the needle, I feel I’ve achieved something. Perhaps that’s why I bought some disposable cameras before a recent trip to the Lake District. There are 26,186 photographs on my iPhone, so I clearly lack self-control. But with only 27 exposures on a disposable, I took my time. I waited for good light. I enjoyed learning the art of composition. Wise up, Molly-Mae A clip from an interview with 22-year-old influencer, ex-Love Island star and PrettyLittleThing’s creative director Molly-Mae Hague has been circulating on social media, in which she quotes the internet’s favourite proverb: “We all have the same 24 hours as Beyoncé.” I hate this productivity-shaming axiom that seems to forget that Beyoncé employs six nannies. This mythical belief that ‘‘working hard” is the answer to success is just another way to call poor people lazy. When people talk about working hard, they rarely mean working to the best of your abilities. They mean working for nothing, accepting low pay and compromising ethical and moral standards and don’t even think about sleeping. What Hague fails to realise is that success is unlikely a consequence of graft alone. In most cases, it’s down to privilege, luck, geography, nepotism and, more often than not, exploitation. Does she think that her seven-figure deal with PrettyLittleThing came from working her “absolute arse off” and not from the fact that the brand, owned by Boohoo, was selling clothes made by workers paid as little as £3.50 an hour?