culture

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.…

Time was, a player had to worry about getting her spot blown up because of three-way calling. Or, maybe sending a love note to the wrong email address. And we won’t even get into the many love games and dilemmas that arise on Facebook. Now, the geniuses at Google have come up with a new “service” called…

“I’m His Only Woman,” Jennifer Hudson’s duet with her fellow American Idol alumna Fantasia, is enjoying heavy rotation on black radio. On the extended version on Hudson’s self-titled debut album, the song opens with Fantasia phoning Jennifer to talk “woman to woman” about the man whom they share. Fantasia: … I’m calling right now to…

If you were worried about the California mother of 14, Nadya Suleman, making ends meet, worry no more. Suleman has launched her own website where her “fans” can make donations and leave comments for her and the octuplets. This was a good move on her part for a number of reasons. First, she doesn’t have…

“Tell me what I need to know,” people often say to me. “Here is what you need to know,” I answer. —Suze Orman, The Road to Wealth How a bottle-blond former waitress and self-described “55-year-old virgin” with a taste for the good life became the financial messiah for millions of Americans might be a fun…