culture

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”:…

Making films is hard and making good ones even harder, so the American Black Film Festival, held last weekend in Los Angeles, adheres to the old adage that 90 percent of life is just showing up. To paraphrase a panelist during one of the festival’s events, “I’ve seen Citizen Kane and that shit was boring.…

Nearly every year, some baseball team has a Cinderella season, rising from the depths of many losing or mediocre seasons and jostling among the perennial contenders for first place. But no team fits the metaphor as well as this year’s edition of the Tampa Bay Rays. The Rays, who changed their name from Devil Rays…

My son, Liam Kojo Johnson, entered the world pink and screaming, slate blue eyes squeezed shut. Peach fuzz covered his perfectly shaped head, a place-holder for the blonde hair that would soon grow there. His twin sister, Chloe Adjoa, came in peace. She was the color of gingerbread, with jet-black hair. Her calm, stoic face…

Let me relate one of my most unpleasant dining experiences. ABoston journalist was passing through Los Angeles for a night and hoping to see as many of her LA-based friends as possible. To help keep things sane, one of her local buddies organized a group dinner so she could see everyone at once. The evening…

Sometimes when the planets align and all the stars have found their height, there is a second when the world slows to a crawl and your ears stand at attention, and in that moment it all makes sense. Jean Grae caught that second like a firefly and stuck it a Mason jar when she hooked…

Trumpeter Roy Hargrove has beaten the odds. Hargrove hit the New York City jazz scene in the late ’80s amid of a blaze of hype calling him the new trumpet star. Blazes of hype were somewhat common in the jazz world then, as a succession of young, good-looking musicians seemed to take turns being flavor…