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Time for the South to Integrate Record Books
By Evin Demirel For a state of 3 million people, Arkansas has produced more than its share of basketball heroes. Sidney Moncrief, Scottie Pippen, Derek Fisher and Joe Johnson have accrued 18 All-Star appearances and 11 NBA titles. As high schoolers, however, none of them stacked up to Eddie Miles and Jackie Ridgle. In the…
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Quality Early Education Makes a Difference
Written by Ray Fisman In recent years, school districts from New York City to Los Angeles have revamped the way teachers are evaluated and rewarded. In the District of Columbia, teachers voted last year for the option to trade job security for merit pay, meaning that high-performing instructors could expect five-figure bonuses (and the laggards…
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Ellen Johnson Sirleaf Has Fanboys
Written by Dayo Olopade The trio of Nobel Peace Prize laureates for 2011 makes a great case for global feminism. The activists — all three from developing countries — have changed the world for themselves and for other women. In turn, Leymah Gbowee and Tawakkol Karman have received their deserved moment in the spotlight. Only…
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Orindatus Simon Bolivar Wall
Written by Daniel J. Sharfstein His very name hovered on the line between slavery and freedom: Orindatus Simon Bolivar Wall. Orindatus was a slave’s name, through and through. It had a Latinate grandiosity that many masters favored for their chattel when Wall was born on a North Carolina plantation in the 1820s, the son of…
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Editor of The Anthology of Rap Responds
Paul Devlin, Slate: What was your process for transcribing the lyrics of the songs included in The Anthology of Rap? Adam Bradley: We appreciate the opportunity to respond to your questions, Paul. In our Introduction to The Anthology of Rap, we discuss our editorial procedures and transcription principles. Our process was as follows: (1) Listen to…
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Why Are There So Many Errors in The Anthology of Rap?
Written by Paul Devlin Last Thursday, I wrote an article for Slate about The Anthology of Rap, officially published this week by the Yale University Press. In that piece, I pointed out the errors I’d found in reading the book’s transcriptions of rap lyrics. (I also noted how tricky and difficult such transcription can be.)…
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Fact-Check the Rhyme
By Paul Devlin As of this week, rap finally has an anthology, published by Yale University Press. The Anthology of Rap sets out to capture the evolution of rap lyrics through what its editors consider representative examples, collecting the work of a wide variety of MCs who recorded from 1979 through 2009, from Grandmaster Caz to Joell…
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Williams Firing: Shirley Not Again
By William Saletan Shirley Sherrod, meet Juan Williams. Three months ago, right-wingers clipped a video of Sherrod to make her look like a racist. They circulated the video on the Internet, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture fired her. Now it’s happening again. This time, left-wingers have done the editing. They clipped a video of…
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The Other Blind Sides
By Josh Levin A destitute black teenager moves in with a rich white family, takes up football, boosts his grades and becomes a star NFL offensive lineman. There’s a reason The Blind Side was a best-selling book and a monster box-office hit — the tale of Michael Oher and the Tuohy family sounds like it…
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Have Tourists Taken Over Sunday in Harlem?
By Jeremy Stahl As the summer tourist season draws to a close in New York, so too winds down the high period for one of the more peculiar attractions the city has to offer: Sunday church services in Harlem, which bring in thousands of foreign travelers each week. While the practice has been the topic…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
