culture

Here’s the wonderful thing about Mos Def’s new film, Be Kind Rewind: I can’t remember a single triumphant moment—and there are several—when one character drives the scene. Solos are left for the emotional valleys; the peaks come in ensemble. That’s the film’s organizing idea, that collectivity fosters not just strength, but joy. It’s an awfully…

Sweet Sweetback’s Salad with Roasted Beet Vinaigrette Yield: 4 Servings You bled my momma! You bled my poppa! (But you won’t bleed ME!) — as echoed over Earth Wind, and Fire’s music in the 1971 film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song Last weekend I was in Los Angeles filming an episode for “Mario’s Greenhouse,” a television…

I went on Match dot com not to find someone but to rid myself of silly romantic illusions. It worked exquisitely. Remember last year when that film clip was making the rounds of the Internet, the one about a black man taking his white girlfriend to his ex-wife’s house and then sticking around to deliver…

Americans have always had an uneasy relationship with learning and those who pursue it. We are a nation that has made free public education a birthright, but we pay teachers the lowest salaries of any group of college-educated professionals. In the last two presidential elections, we’ve chosen a man of less-than-mediocre intellect whose thinking is…

Money’s tight. And as a recession looms, it’s getting tighter. So should you spend your hard-earned money — sometimes more than double the price —to buy hormone-free milk? More and more Americans are saying “yes.” Bowing to consumer pressure, last month Wal-Mart announced that its store brand milk will now come exclusively from cows free…

Since February, I have stopped putting out. I pledged a vow of frugality, and I plan on protecting it until I get into the right relationship with my money. No mall runs, expensive dining, or manicure/pedicure combo deals. It’s my virtue. I think far too many of us are spending too easily, giving up the…

My friend John is one of the smartest people I know. He has degrees from two elite schools and has held high-ranking positions in both the public and private sector. Yet, when we get together to talk about baseball, he counts on his fingers. His team is good this year because on the index finger,…

What would Dr. King say to us today? We have a tendency to sanitize his memory, to remember the Dr. King who fought the evil of state-mandated segregation, the Dr. King who marched on Washington in 1963, the Dr. King with whom all Americans say they (now) agree. But there was another Dr. King –…

Periodically, I get a phone call from my grandmother that begins with her saying, “Listen to this,” or simply with her reading aloud a vignette she’d just written about her life in Newark, N.J. Usually, I tell her the brief tales sound good and encourage her to keep writing. “I’m leaving all this stuff for…

The day after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot, I went out into the riot-torn Washington, D.C. streets and into schools in those neighborhoods scorched by flames to talk to the children. I went to tell them not to loot and raid, so that they would not get arrested and ruin their futures. A…