culture

Ever since the levees broke, I’d been meaning to get back there. But things kept coming up. So it is when you’re doing the avoidance dance. I’ve always had a complicated relationship with New Orleans, my ancestral home. I finally made it back to NOLA two summers ago, driving past my grandparents’ long-abandoned house. Literally…

Most football coaches are brimming with optimism this time of year, but few with as much Tom Williams, the first black head football coach at Yale University. It has little to do with his expectations about the annual grudge match with Harvard later this year. Williams has broken through one of the most insidious glass…

With a steady day job squared away, Michael Vick now has a way of paying back his creditors and Judge Frank Santoro likes his plan for how he intends to do it. From ESPN: A judge in Virginia on Thursday approved Michael Vick‘s plan to repay creditors who are owed $20 million and emerge from…

The French rap game ain’t nothin to fuqua wit: From The New York Times: A gentlemanly patron of the arts, Frédéric Mitterrand, France’s culture minister, seems an unlikely champion of rap. But when the French artist Orelsan called publicly for his support at the height of a months-long free-speech polemic around the rapper’s song “Sale…

Has the proposed network become Oprah’s Waterloo? From The LA Times: The Oprah Winfrey Network seems to have everything needed to succeed: some of the best creative minds in the business, strong financial backing, a loyal audience and enthusiastic advertisers eager to buy commercial time. But more than 20 months after the announcement that Winfrey…

In a culture where many black men typically succumb to the hyper-masculine roles assigned to them at birth, you wouldn’t expect many to be not-so-closeted fans of a gay man who concludes his commentary with the phrase, “double kisses.” Yet gender-bending Internet personality B. Scott, with his lengthy eyelashes, high cheekbones and long hair (usually…

Fat, fatter, fattest. That’s the harshly accurate description of many kids today. Childhood obesity rates have doubled over the past decade, and kids have gone from being fat to severely obese. Overall, African-American children are statistically the fattest compared with their white and Latino counterparts. And fat kids mean unhealthy kids. Obese children and adolescents…

In the final scene of Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino’s latest bromide of violence, high camp and revisionist history, one character looks at his bloody handiwork and giddily remarks: “I think this might be my masterpiece!” No doubt that tongue in cheek rejoinder comes directly from Tarantino himself, who has to live up to the critical…

Shawn Carter is lending a helping hand while letting people know he is, indeed, dropping another album. From MTV: As MTV News reported on Monday, Jay-Z will be headlining New York’s Madison Square Garden on September 11, the eighth anniversary of the tragic events of the World Trade Center attacks (and the release date of…