culture

Forget Black Voices, The YBF or the sadly outmoded Black Planet. For young, upwardly-mobile people of color who are in-the-know, there’s one Web site that trumps all of the above—Stuff Educated Black People Like. Notice the qualifier, “Educated.” It’s so very necessary. You see, we so often have to remind others (and ourselves) that we’re…

Twenty years ago, hip-hop music was in its Golden Age. Recently Rolling Stone listed the “15 Albums that Made Rap Explode.” All were works released in ’88, and all laid the seeds for hip-hop’s dominance of popular music years later. From the political and sonic boom of Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions…

“I’m not broke. I’m just not liquid,” 45-year-old Evander Holyfield argued earlier this month upon narrowly avoiding a court appearance on charges that he was around $9,000 behind in court-ordered child support payments for one of his 11 children. But there’s no denying that as recently as two weeks ago, the “Real Deal’s” 54,000-square-foot, 109-room,…

For decades, I was a big football fan, the kind of guy who knew the situational specialists for every team. Five months a year, I had a six day week; Sunday belonged to the NFL. Then, about five years ago I got heavily into advanced statistics (once a geek, always a geek). Rather than focus…

On January 17, 21-year-old Baron Pikes was stopped by the police. Nearly half a million volts of electricity later, he died on the street. Handcuffed, held down and stunned with a Taser-brand electro-weapon seven times before he died (and then twice more after that), Pikes’ heart, the coroner notes, simply gave out. Amnesty International estimates…

In a span of 24 hours this week, three sure-fire, absolute-lock, no-doubt-about-it future Hall of Famers, Manny Ramirez, Ken Griffey Jr. and Ivan “Pudge” Rodriguez, were traded. That may not be a record, but it gives baseball chatterheads a lot to talk about. However, once everybody settles down, they may notice that all this activity…

The grisly details of Baron Pikes’ violent death are remarkable. There’s the fact that Officer Scott Nugent jammed his Taser into the unarmed 21-year-old nine times in 14 minutes. There’s the fact that Pikes was handcuffed during each of those 50,000-volt shocks. And there’s the fact that witnesses heard Pikes, who was supposedly resisting arrest,…

Palace Council (Knopf, 2008) Prologue: “The Council” The lawyer was nervous, and that was odd. His hands trembled on the steering wheel, and that was odder still. He had learned in the war that there was no sin in being afraid as long as the others never knew. He understood that courage was a discipline.…

Summer is officially in high gear, making it a perfect time for an open memo to all those women addicted to showing off their cracks and assets in public. Do the rest of us a favor—don’t! It’s OK to show a little décolletage, as long as you keep your headlights a little dim. I’m not…

Simone snuggled up beside me and pointed to my face. “Mommy,” she said, “is a black girl.” How observant, I thought, for a 3-year-old to make such a distinction. “Yes,” I said, “Mommy is a black girl.” “Simone,” she continued, “is a white girl.” In all the time I had dreamed about being a mother…