culture

When the NBA all-stars take the court in Phoenix Sunday night, it will mark a subtle but distinctive change in the game. During the last few years, the game’s top players have been moving away from the concept of a great player with a supporting cast toward a more team-oriented approach where the best player…

Like most corporate Negroes, The Buzz is a pro at code-switching, been perfecting the artform since birth. So it isn’t exactly news to us that our new President has mastered the art, as our homie Jack Shafer recounts in fascinating detail in Slate. I a speech reprinted in the New York Review of Books, the…

Romance needn’t be the latest casualty of the recession. The Buzz was disappointed to hear the NPR report by Sam Fullwood III that flower sales are down at one of our favorite U Street shops. But take heart: Over at AfroBella, The Root contributor Natalie McNeal a.k.a. The Frugalista, gives these pointers on how to…

On a day when President Barack Obama spoke in Springfield, Illinois and Washington, D.C. about Abraham Lincoln’s legacy, shared sacrifice, and the importance of national unity, noting that history teaches us, “There are certain things we can only do together,” Sen. Judd Gregg, Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Commerce, and the third Republican slated to…

A year ago, I decided to go back and ask all of the men in my past why they ultimately did not want to be with me. My girls were concerned. “Isn’t it just rehashing painful memories?” “Couldn’t you end up feeling awful about yourself?” But I was tired of the “it’s not you, it’s…

Cultural observer James Baldwin once compared love to a battle; he also said that love is growing up. Writer Zora Neale Hurston said it “makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place,” while poet Nikki Giovanni declared it an adventure. Novelist Harriet Wilson called love an “arbitrary and inexorable tyrant.” Me? I think it…

THE FIRST TIME I VISIT my father’s bungalow at the University of Nigeria, I perch on a vinyl settee in the parlor and drink milky tea while my father rambles on about the student riots, the military government’s Structural Adjustment Program, his college years with my mother, what he recalls her saying about the family…

The Buzz is really starting to worry about Fox News commentator and NPR analyst Juan Williams. As if his unfounded criticism of Gwen Ifill’s Obama book last fall weren’t bad enough, he shocked us again with his comments on Faux News about Our Belle Michelle: “Michelle Obama, you know, she’s got this Stokely Carmichael in a…

While on a humanitarian mission to Sierra Leone, the actress Salma Hayek met a baby whose mother was unable to breastfeed. So Hayek, who is still nursing her own daughter, decided to breastfeed the child, a tender moment that was of course caught on tape. Was this a publicity stunt designed to top Madonna and Angelina,…

When Sports Illustrated broke the news that Yankee third baseman Alex Rodriguez, by most reckoning the greatest active player in baseball today, had tested positive in 2003 for use of Primobolan and testosterone, I shrugged. But then the story got real interesting. My initial disinterest lay not in the story’s importance but in its tone.…