Hustle and Show
There isn’t much sexual salaciousness in Sudhir Venkatesh’s ethnographic treatment of gang culture on Chicago’s South Side.He was a relatively naïve graduate student at the University of Chicago when he first started studying crack-dealing gangs in one of the country’s most notorious housing projects. Venkatesh embarked on a sociological journey
Searching for the Black Carrie
I know she exists. I know she lives uptown like Carrie and has a life insurance policy’s worth of Manolo’s in her closet. I know she vacations in the Hamptons or maybe Sag Harbor. And I know she has brown-skinned friends who live the same way.This weekend I went to
My Obama Inauguration Diet
Monday is the official start of my Obama inauguration diet. Having secured the nomination, I believe that Barack can beat John McCain in the general election. This means that after months of binging on the primaries, I have just over six months to get in shape, and I have a
The Big ‘What If?’
What if Bobby Kennedy’s bodyguard Roosevelt Grier had spotted the gun a few moments earlier and wrestled Sirhan Sirhan to the floor before he could fire the fatal shot?What if Kennedy hadn’t died only a few hours after he won the 1968 California Democratic primary, but had gone on to
The Death of a Movement
One day, one hour and 47 minutes after three bullets struck him down in a Los Angeles hotel kitchen, Robert Francis Kennedy, the junior senator from New York and likely Democratic presidential nominee, died at 1:44 a.m., June 6, 1968.It would take years, decades even, for historians to make sense
Revisiting A Classic
A couple of weeks ago, I bumped into Roberto, a college classmate on the street. Since we were both class of ’82, this is a drop-everything moment: We live in the same Manhattan neighborhood, but our contact seems limited to annual chance encounters.After catching up, our dialogue turned to sports,
