culture

Harriette Cole is the author of the book of meditations 108 Stitches: Words We Live By and a contributing editor at The Root. Follow her on Twitter. 

If I had moved to New York City last fall as intended, you would surely be referring to me in the past tense today. I wasn’t ready—mentally, financially or emotionally—to give up my chill yet scatterbrained and spiraling life in Panama to write and power-walk for a living in the City That Never Covers Its…

Dear Drs. Lewis and Gail Wyatt:      I have to think about other women to have an orgasm with my wife. It feels like I’m cheating on her.  Should I tell her? Is this normal? —Scott C. This is a really good question because thinking about other women (or men) in order to feel the heat…

Apple Inc. and the Thurgood Marshall College Fund have partnered to build a pipeline for African-American students into the world’s largest information technology company, with a new internship effort called the Apple HBCU Scholars Program.  This year, 31 students from HBCUs will each be awarded $25,000 during their senior year of study. They will also participate…

As a kid, I was never really into comics. I watched the occasional Saturday-morning cartoons, but beyond that, the unique arcs and storylines of the Marvel and D.C. universes are something that I’ve come to understand more of only in recent years—usually while a male paramour is rabidly trying to explain that the schism between…

When James Wright Chanel of Chicago burst into song last week during a funny video tasting of a sweet potato pie made by R&B diva Patti LaBelle, he seemed to just be having fun. But then his hilarious review of the pie, which is sold at Wal-Mart, snagged more than 6 million views, pushing him…

Nearly a month after Lamar Odom was discovered unconscious in a legal Las Vegas brothel, he is still struggling with communication and mobility, friends and family told TMZ. Sources told the entertainment-news site that he has made little progress in recent weeks and is only able “to speak a word here and there, and at…

Saturday Night Live spoofed Ben Carson’s fanciful claims of a violent childhood in a hilarious sketch called “The Adventures of Young Ben Carson,” according to the Daily Beast. Before kicking off the episode, the show’s Cecily Strong paid tribute to victims of the horrific Paris terror attacks. “Paris is the City of Light,” she said…

There aren’t many recently invented terms in our cultural lexicon that I enjoy using more than I enjoy using “white tears”—the phrase created to describe what happens when certain types of white people either complain about a nonexistent racial injustice or are upset by a nonwhite person’s success at the supposed expense of a white…