‘Baltimore has the worst PR of any city in America’: a culture critic on his hometown, race, police and art

<p>Lawrence Burney’s new book, No Sense in Wishing, comes at a time when the US is facing a crackdown on cities, art, culture and education</p><p>Lawrence Burney’s latest, No Sense in Wishing, is a book in which the famous phenom and dark horse share equal weight on the page. It’s also a love letter to Baltimore – to its artists, its crabs and its streets – and a Bildungsroman that finds its heroes in Lupe Fiasco and Frederick Douglass alike.</p><p>Burney, a Baltimore native, culture critic, and essayist, guides us through a memoir about the art, whether films or paintings or song lyrics, that have informed his personal and professional trajectory. He writes about growing up amongst artists with Black family traditions rooted in the Chesapeake, his journey through fatherhood at 19, and then to New York, where he helped spearhead Vice’s coverage of lesser known rap and hip-hop artists otherwise left out of mainstream media coverage.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2025/oct/05/lawrence-burney-no-sense-in-wishing-baltimore">Continue reading...</a>