culture

Something about the widespread media coverage of David Carr’s new memoir, The Night of the Gun, is bothersome. It is noteworthy that The New York Times columnist attempts to correct an unfortunate trend of exaggerated or fictitious redemptive memoirs like James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (2003). Carr did well to take a reporter’s approach…

There are moments in Trouble the Water, the searing new documentary on Hurricane Katrina, particularly in the hours before the hurricane lands, when you think the central character, Kimberly Rivers Roberts, just doesn’t get it. She’s got her video camera trained on her Ninth Ward block, playfully interrogating everybody about what they’re gonna do when…

HBO’s newest documentary The Black List is a lot like the imagined coffee table book that inspired it—super-sized with lots of pictures meant to incite conversation. The film’s images rotate like a Who’s Who in Black America. Did you know that Slash from Guns N’ Roses was black? Or that the former president of Planned…

It’s funny how money change a situation Miscommunication leads to complication My emancipation don’t fit your equation… Some wan’ play young Lauryn like she dumb —Lauryn Hill, “Lost Ones” —Scroll back a decade, and there was Lauryn Hill—top of the world, Ma!—clutching five Grammys and sending shoutouts to her babies, thanking them for not spilling…

The Roots opened up with their hip-hop jazz riffs and stirring interludes of saxophones and drums when a big-boned woman whispered in a throaty voice: So when the analog girl in a digital world gonna come out? The lights dimmed. A medley of Badu hits played, taking me back to all the places I lived…

Ragan Henry, a little-known African-American pioneer in media ownership who quietly amassed a small empire of 60 television and radio stations between the early 1970s and 1990, died late last month in Philadelphia with as little fanfare as he had lived. He was 74. Henry’s death should be an item of conversation for anyone who…

This isn’t the ordinary Five Questions for a Public Mama that I write periodically on my blog, Seeds. I don’t want to know how Lauryn disciplines her five kids, what it’s like being married to a Marley or where she buys her knit hats. I don’t want to know if she has a television in…

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told us last weekend that America’s AIDS epidemic is 40 percent larger than it had believed, and that black America accounts for about 45 percent of new infections each year. If we’re only 13 percent of the population, how can that be? There’s no one simple answer.…

First things first: Ben Stiller’s new movie Tropic Thunder, is neither as offensive as some feared nor as wry as I had personally (perversely?) hoped. In an age where repetitive, moronic attacks on the dignity of various groups are often met by tactical shows of manufactured outrage, Thunder, with its kitchen-sink jumble of provocations—blackface, Jewface,…

Dear Mr. Wayne, I am such a fan. Really. But I am getting ahead of myself. Male groupies are kind of embarrassing … What I mean to say is that I find your move to a more singing, spoken word form of rap very, very exciting. For example, from “A Milli” on “Tha Carter III”:…