culture

There isn’t much sexual salaciousness in Sudhir Venkatesh’s ethnographic treatment of gang culture on Chicago’s South Side. He was a relatively naïve graduate student at the University of Chicago when he first started studying crack-dealing gangs in one of the country’s most notorious housing projects. Venkatesh embarked on a sociological journey that would educate him…

There’s a conservative joke poking fun at liberal media that predicts coverage of an impending apocalypse would have the headline “World to End: Poor and Minorities Hardest Hit.” Despite his tenure as a Republican congressman, it seems J.C. Watts never heard that joke. Then again, maybe he did and just didn’t understand why it’s funny.…

The box office has given its ecstatic verdict on the film Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. ($482 million in gross ticket sales and counting.) But one little discussed metric that some people have been using to judge Skull (or, at least, that I have) is: How offensive was it compared to…

A couple of weeks ago, I bumped into Roberto, a college classmate on the street. Since we were both class of ’82, this is a drop-everything moment: We live in the same Manhattan neighborhood, but our contact seems limited to annual chance encounters. After catching up, our dialogue turned to sports, and Roberto made a…

I know she exists. I know she lives uptown like Carrie and has a life insurance policy’s worth of Manolo’s in her closet. I know she vacations in the Hamptons or maybe Sag Harbor. And I know she has brown-skinned friends who live the same way. This weekend I went to see Michael Patrick King’s…

Joshua Packwood’s march across the stage as Morehouse College’s first white valedictorian left a trail of fiery online commentary from African Americans, filled with consternation, anger and fear. For some, white participation and success in the black world means the failure and even end of blackness. For me, Packwood’s successes are but a part of…

It all started with a 30-day trial package of premium cable.I had just moved into my apartment and was enjoying the temporary pleasures of HBO On Demand. In the midst of Million Dollar Baby, I realized there were only two weeks left in my free trial period, just two weeks before a decision was required…

It was the refrain echoed again and again throughout Hillary Clinton’s campaign: It was time, her supporters claimed, for a woman to be president. It made me angry, and it made me tired, the way that white women assumed that my support of Barack Obama was a race thing; a “stand by your man” thing,…

Black professional fighters traditionally have had a way of inspiring a generation of young black men, for better or worse: Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, Muhammad Ali, Mike Tyson.Kimbo Slice is the new inspiration. What? You’ve not heard of Kimbo Slice? Well, maybe you don’t recognize him because I haven’t called him by his full name:…

Until recently, political life in Switzerland was known for cozy relationships between parties and the anti-heroic stance of politicians. For the last 10 years, this rather pacific style of politics has been shattered by the rising influence of the SVP/UDC (Schweizerische Volkspartei/Union démocratique du centre), the Swiss People’s Party, and its billionaire leader,Christoph Blocher. Their demagoguery…