culture

Traditional sports movies, particularly those about baseball, are usually suffused with nostalgia and sentimentality. A few, such as Field of Dreams, do it well enough to endear themselves. Most, like the utterly ridiculous For Love of the Game, are pure treacle.   But the new baseball film, Sugar (Azucar in Spanish), released to coincide with the…

When I was growing up in Chicago, my father took me to a lot of baseball games. Some were just your typical father-son outings, others were special. We might have been on our way to Wrigley Field or Comiskey Park, but in my dad’s eyes we were off to see greatness in action: Willie Mays…

The choice of design for the Smithsonian’s new National Museum of African American History and Culture may well be the highest-profile architectural decision that will be made in Washington for years to come. The five-acre plot, near the Washington Monument, is on the Mall, a civic landscape that should be considered absolutely closed to future…

When the matchup for the finals in the NCAA men’s basketball championship was set between the University of North Carolina Tar Heels and the Michigan State Spartans on Saturday night, one analyst after another began counseling fans to ignore the Tar Heel-Spartan game on Dec. 3 at Ford Field. In that game, UNC ran out…

Reuters: Obama To Troops: ‘Yes We Can (Stay in Iraq Another 18 Months)!’ Reuters: ’09 Hurricane Forecasts—If You’re Black and/or Poor, Please Take Note BJ: Lockheed Assesses Sec Def’s Spending Plan, May Take Bombs and Go Home AP: Vt. Cool with Adam and Steve, Legalizes Gay Marriage CW: Recessions Hurt What Matters Most: Apple to…

Hell hath no fake fury like a blogosphere confronted with Madonna trying to adopt an orphan from the Motherland. It’s as if the Material Mama were some winged she-devil sweeping down on Malawi, armed with moneybags and hell-bent on stealing cute, little black babies. The horror! And so it is with glee that bloggers are…

It’s hard out here for authors these days. You really can’t be just an author. In order to support yourself—because, let’s be honest, most book advances only go so far—you have to be writer, teaching artist, lecturer, hustler, marketing guru, business owner and grant junkie. And when you do get a chance to write, you’re…

CAPE TOWN—While the rest of the world concerned itself with North Korean rocket launches, the G-20 summit meetings in London and the brief embrace shared between Queen Elizabeth and Michelle Obama, thousands of music lovers—perhaps seeking some refuge from those issues and more—descended on Cape Town for its 10th annual jazz festival. And although the…

“I was in the lead that had overshot the mark a couple of miles,” Matthew Henson told a reporter in March 1955, relating the moment when, 46 years earlier, he knew he had conquered the world. “We went back then, and I could see that my footprints were the first at the spot.” “The spot”…

If the championship in NCAA men’s basketball was based on the graduation rates of black players on the teams, it would be Duke and Villanova taking the court tonight in  Detroit rather than Michigan State and the University of North Carolina. Both Duke, which lost in the third round, and Villanova who lost to UNC…