Beyoncé dropped an album last Thursday night, and we’ve spent a lot of time dissecting the meaning of that moment. (Is she groundbreaking? Is she a feminist? Is she allowed to call herself a feminist? Was her nontraditional marketing really just a brilliant marketing ploy? Is she condoning rape on “Drunk in Love”?) Enter #BeyonceThinkPieces,…

We’ve long known about R. Kelly and his taste for underage girls. We all saw the video in which the singer allegedly pees on an underage girl. None of the details of the situation—the video, the dragged-out child pornography case, his marriage to 14-year-old Aaliyah in 1994—are lost on our collective pop-culture memory. Which makes…

Adam Serwer at MSNBC reports that a conservative group is at it again, using social media to post the wrong damn thing, and further widening the gulf between them and the minority voters they desperately need to court if they want a shot at winning future elections. The National Liberty Federation, formerly known as the…

Last night, Beyoncé was kind enough to let us watch Scandal before pulling the pop music stunt of the year. Or maybe decade? Rumors of album delays and random song leaks had us waiting anxiously all year for an announcement on Bey’s fifth studio-album release date. But in lieu of an announcement, Bey just gave…

The producers of Saturday Night Live responded to the lack of diversity in the show’s cast by holding a secret audition for black female comedians only, according to The Gothamist. The showcase, held at Los Angeles’ Groundings theater last Sunday, featured some of our favorite black female comedians, including Simone Shepherd, Tiffany Haddish, LaKendra Tookes…

Buzzfeed and Jezebel posted Skye Townsend’s hilarious Beyoncé impersonation from Vine. It’s pretty spot on. Jezebel commenter Fighting Polish wondered why Beyoncé impersonations are not yet an Internet thing, but they are, and Townsend has been executing them brilliantly for some time on her YouTube channel, AngeliqueandSkye. Here’s Townsend as Bey, expounding on her pregnancy…

Take a look at this sign language interpreter from Nelson Mandela’s televised memorial service: Now take a closer look: He’s using very few facial expressions—an important component of sign language—and he’s repeating the same hand gestures over and over again. In other words: During the broadcast, Bruno Druchen, the national director of DeafSA, tweeted: And…

To promote the release of his latest project, Black Panties, R. Kelly took to Twitter to indulge his ego and engage the masses. He urged his followers to ask him questions using the hashtag #AskRKelly. And for every one question tweeted about his music and career, there were a gazillion about his sordid sexual history…

At Nelson Mandela’s memorial service Tuesday morning, President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama sat next to Denmark’s Prime Minister Helle Thorning Schmidt. And it’s 2013, so the president did what most would: He leaned in to join his neighbor in a selfie. A series of photos making rounds on the Internet appear to suggest…

Yes, I said it. Got 2 B Real, the diva talk show created by @PattiLahelle, is the greatest black Web series in the history of the internet. Even Issa Rae tweets its one-liners: Thanks to Got 2 B Real, the Internet is littered with countless examples of masterful executions of shade. The series officially ended…