culture

Pamela K. El has a job she loves, as a marketing vice president for State Farm Insurance Company. Two years ago, her company began sponsoring “The 50-Million Pound Challenge,” a national, interactive program to help people lose weight. El traveled across the country with Dr. Ian Smith, the physician, journalist and well-known author of The…

On a blighted stretch of industrial highway in Maryland, Artmosphere, an arts-focused restaurant/bar/coffee shop, was a little light in the darkness. Creative types—writers, painters, musicians—would flock there for the camaraderie and to feed off of each other’s energy. On any given night, there was Miss Jane, poet Jane Landolt, eating dinner at her usual perch…

Finally! It took four games, but the Boston Celtics second-round series with the Orlando Magic is no longer looking like a severe letdown. Most basketball fans have had the series circled since mid-April, when the Cleveland Cavaliers clinched the best record in the Eastern conference, and put Boston and Orlando, the teams with the third-…

Front Page: Wanda Sykes Dispenses Topical Humor to Journalists, President CNN: Have We Overcome Our Race Problems?…Uh…Sure, Why Not? AA: Ghana on Cusp of Oil Boom; Daniel Day-Lewis Readies for ‘There Will Be Blood II’ BET: First Black Supermodel Gets Sued for Something or Other J&J: HBCUs to Obama: Not Everyone Went to Ivy League…

I have spent a significant portion of my 15-year career as a financial journalist at the New York Stock Exchange. Whether I was working for Dow Jones, CBS or CNN, I put in a great deal of time reporting from the NYSE trenches. I learned to speak the language of money straight from the horse.…

MONDAY AP: Obama Announces Plan to Cut Tax Loopholes AA: Zimbabwe: Mukanya Revisits Chimurenga Classics CBS: Malawian Dad Opposes Madonna Adoption FOX: First Family May Vacation in Martha’s Vineyard NWS: Doctors Warn Skin Cancer is Equal-Opportunity Disease SFC: Senators Want Obama to Look Beyond Fed. Bench for Souter Replacement TR: Black Youth Shunning Baseball BET:…

Truth be told, we weren’t so sure that the world needed another addition to the whole Star Trek enterprise. (Yes, Trekkies, we know: Sacrilege!) There are far too many spinoffs and spinoffs of spinoffs in the pantheon of summer blockbuster hits. So been there, so done that. Transformers 2. Really? But this latest entree, rather…

I’m not sure exactly when it happened. I’m referring, of course, to that moment in my mother’s mind when I shifted from being her prized only daughter to her only hope for grandchildren. The woman’s got a crazy case of “the grandbabies.” Maybe it was last fall, when I turned 28 and spent a stimulus…

One spring afternoon about 15 years ago, I was walking along a Manhattan street and spied an unusual scene. It was a woman and her teenage son, walking about half a block ahead of me. He was dribbling a basketball. She was coaching. She was critiquing the form on his shot, stressing that he needs…