culture

From The New York Times: No more than five or six minutes elapsed from the time the police were alerted to the possibility of a break-in at a home in a quiet residential neighborhood and the awful clamping of handcuffs on the wrists of the distinguished Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. If Professor Gates…

Spending money just because you have some to spend is very, very rarely a solid fiscal strategy. But no one seemed to tell that to Portland Trail Blazers’ general manager Kevin Pritchard. All month, he has been eager to throw money after one free agent or another. And finally, late last week, he got his…

From The Washington Post: Fire gutted the Chain Bridge Road mansion and extensive art collection of longtime D.C. arts patron Peggy Cooper Cafritz late Wednesday, and officials said low water pressure slowed firefighters’ efforts to contain the blaze. It took almost two hours to find a sustained stream of water strong enough to fight the…

From the NY Times: On weekends, the subway and bus trip can take two and a half hours — each way, that is. Alexis Page, 13, is pursuing her sport, her art, from uptown Manhattan to the outer fringes of Brooklyn. Millions of hopeful American youths ride to practice in team vans or their parents’…

In an interview airing tonight on TV One, Joe Jackson sits down with Smokey Fontaine and, in the preview below, confirms that Omer Bhatti is Michael Jackson’s son. Joe Jackson, you are…something else.

From Elon James White at This Week in Blackness: “Shem Walker? Who the heck is Shem Walker?” That was the response a friend had when I brought up the name of the recently murdered Brooklynite. I will admit that I would have LOVED to stand on my higher-than-thou step stool and wag my finger at…

From BBC: The trial of three of the men accused of the rape and murder of one of South Africa’s leading sportswomen, the openly gay football star Eudy Simelane, starts in South Africa on Wednesday. Thirty-one lesbian women have been reported raped and murdered in homophobic attacks in South Africa since 1998. But according to…

From Der Spiegel: Anshu Jain, 46, listened stoically and silently to the remarks of shareholders at the annual meeting of Deutsche Bank at the end of May. Many were troubled by the fact that the bank had reported its biggest ever loss in 2008, €3.9 billion ($5.6 billion), for which Jain, as its top investment…

LONDON—Romeo is black. And no one cares. While this might be big news in America, no one in London is making any fuss about Adetomiwa Edun in Romeo & Juliet, playing through August 23 at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. Here, it’s just damn good theater. No nuance, no emotional triggers playing on Edun’s ethnicity. I admit…