culture

It’s been a few weeks since Beyoncé turned the entire Internet into a collection of underqualified Easy Rawlinses­—theorizing, guessing, hypothesizing and attempting to deduce the identity of Becky With the Good Hair. (The verdict? Maybe it was Rachel Ray. Maybe it was a MacGuffin. And maybe it was just Beyoncé’s new way of saying Sasha…

Scandal’s season 5 finale kicks off with Jake Ballard calmly poisoning his new father-in-law. Now, if you watch enough Scandal, you’ll start to become numb to murder. In fact, murder will start to seem like an obvious option. I can’t count the number of times I’ve yelled at the screen, “Just kill him already!” Especially as it…

Over the weekend I swung by the 156 Art Fair, an annual exhibition of African art at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, N.Y. Among the many strong presentations on display, Phoebe Boswell’s Stranger in the Village stood out. In April 2015 Boswell, a biracial Kenyan woman currently living in London, was temporarily situated in Gothenburg, Sweden,…

I’ve been to more concerts in my lifetime than I can remember. But I can tell you which were distinctly the best and worst that I’ve attended. The best was in early 1999, during my senior year of high school. I went to see the Roots at the State Theatre (now the Fillmore) in Detroit.…

In 2012, at a time when many felt as if R&B had fallen off, Frank Ocean was our savior. Channel Orange felt like love on a warm, summer day. Not only was the music on point, but it was different and inclusive. Revealing his first love with a man and lyrics such as “You’re running…

We love family. They’re always there for us—asking for money or needing a ride to the airport or … never mind. Cookie has been talking a lot about family unity. In “Rise by Sin,” family matters cause all the problems. When Lucious reluctantly took in his batty mom, Leah Walker, in the last episode, he…

A mother’s love is said to be one of the purest forms of human love. For her, the loss of a child is unimaginable. In 2014 Lesley McSpadden faced tragedy on the world stage with the death of her 18-year-old son, Michael Brown. The fatal police shooting ignited protest across the country—and sparked a rallying…

It’s not all mistresses and murder with Scandal. While the soapy political drama frequently takes us deep into the world of make-believe, Scandal is also known for its plucked-straight-from-the-headlines plotlines that tap directly into the zeitgeist, the most noteworthy of which may have been the Ferguson, Mo.-inspired “Lawn Chair” episode. Indeed, in the midst of all the over-the-top…

My boyfriend of four years finally proposed six months ago. Now he refuses to discuss wedding plans or set a date. He wants to go to premarital counseling. I want to start planning the wedding. Should I force the issue or be patient and wait until he is ready to discuss the wedding? —Anonymous I’m…

Once upon a time, pretty long ago, I used to manage a nightclub in Washington, D.C. At this particular nightclub, Liv (RIP), we had a rotating list of parties throughout the week. On Friday nights, we had gay night. This was always typically a good night for us for a few different reasons: 1) Gay…