culture

For much of this decade, the Eastern Conference of the NBA has been called the Leastern Conference, due to the rather severe inferiority of eastern teams when compared with their Western Conference counterparts. It wasn’t a myth. From 1999-2003, the Eastern Conference representatives managed just six wins in losing five straight finals to either the…

Chris Rock has a classic bit in his 1999 HBO special “Bigger and Blacker” where he documents his father’s obsession with Robitussin as a cure-all remedy. “Daddy I got asthma! Robitussin. I got cancer! Robitussin. I broke my leg! Daddy pourin’ Robitussin on it.” When it’s time for me to ponder the complex and nuanced…

The state of Alabama has issued a warning to its state workers: Get fit or pay up. In August, the Alabama State Employees’ Insurance Board approved a plan that will charge workers  an additional $25 to cover their insurance premiums, if they don’t take advantage of free health screenings available to all state employees. The…

The question nagging at me comes out of a very animated panel discussion on Martha’s Vineyard last summer that dealt with that perennial hot-button issue of race in America: Do we have to talk about “group culture” when dealing with the status of blacks in America? One panelist insisted that black culture was deeply implicated in…

The Queen City Motel sits barely noticed on this city’s West Side, just seven minutes from the wobbly banks and new construction projects commanding the downtown skyline. At the Queen City, you find people who are living by day and by week, watching economic calamity from the outer edge of misery. Some have no cars,…

Baseball fans outside of the fan bases of the Tampa Bay Rays and the Philadelphia Phillies should have an intense rooting interest in the World Series that starts tonight. They should be rooting for a long series. Six- and seven-game series are the ones in which both teams can envision victory, and it is where…

Each year, Steve Hessler and Dolly Vehlow make a pilgrimage from their home in Washington, D.C., to the Kentuck Festival of the Arts in Northport, Ala., to chat with old friends and buy art. Since the 1990s, the couple has purchased pieces from Mose Tolliver, Charlie Lucas, Yvonne Wells and Betty Sue Matthews, a cadre…

This picture of presidential hopeful Barack Obama doing pull-ups in Missoula, MT was taken by the photographer Callie Shell for Time magazine last April. I like it! Shell has snapped an entire collection of wistful shots of the great black/white Hope from Illinois, some grand and sweeping, others mundanely human. Just like those ones of…

Months ago I got a message from an old schoolyard chum, “It’s our 10-year anniversary. Can you believe it?” The thought of a reunion had me super excited. We could flip through our high-school memories like flash cards. The time Ms. Dumoski taught an entire period of trig with her skirt tucked into her control…

Defined by the chaos of a presidential campaign under literal siege, an unpopular foreign war and the compound tragedies of the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the year 1968 was a pivot point in the national life—the year America almost stopped being America. Part of that upheaval was cultural. The…