culture
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Is Public Shaming the Right Way to Discipline Kids?
It’s a son forced to hold a stack of books over his head until he’s in pain as punishment for stealing. It’s a girl wearing a “shame shirt” to school for bringing home bad grades. It’s an old-man, Sherman Hemsley-esque haircut for a misbehaving boy. It’s an underperforming student strolling a busy city intersection with…
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SXSW: RZA Explains How Films Inspired His Music
Anyone who has ever listened to the Wu-Tang Clan knows that movies, especially martial art films, have been a big influence on the hip-hop group’s sound and style. During a nearly hourlong keynote speech Monday at South by Southwest, RZA, the group’s chief founder, shared with his audience how the films he watched as a…
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SXSW: Diversity Hackathon Laying the Groundwork for the Future
While the tech industry continued to try to figure out what to do about its diversity problem, 50 high school and college students of color were getting a taste of what it might be like to work in Silicon Valley at MVMT50’s inaugural hackathon, held over the weekend at Huston-Tillotson University in Austin, Texas. Organizations…
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SXSW: What It’s Like to Be Black in Silicon Valley
How to solve the diversity issue in tech was one of the topics covered by the South by Southwest panel “How to Not Hire and Retain Employees of Color” on Saturday. The session—part of an initiative to diversify the annual interactive, film and music festival happening now in Austin, Texas—offered a unique first-person perspective of…
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Isaiah Austin’s Diagnosis Dashed His NBA Dreams But He’s Decided to Dream Again
Dream again. That was Isaiah Austin’s chosen motto after he found out nine months ago that he has Marfan syndrome—a genetic disorder that affects the body’s connective tissue—which put an abrupt end to his dreams of playing professional basketball just days before he would have heard his name called as a late-first-round NBA draft pick.…
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Ava DuVernay at SXSW: ‘If Your Dream Only Includes You, It’s Too Small’
From Selma, Ala., to South by Southwest, filmmaker Ava DuVernay took her message of living in the moment and being grateful for what she has to the masses in her keynote address Saturday at the annual festival in Austin, Texas. The director, whose film Selma was nominated for a best picture Oscar, broke away from…
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SXSW: How Black Twitter Is Changing the Narrative of Black Stories
When the hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown landed on the front page of the New York Times last year, it was a game-changing moment in the evolution of black Twitter, particularly in how social media was forcing mainstream news media to look at the way they portrayed African Americans. “Through the posting of two photos and a hashtag,…
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SXSW: Taking a Moment and Turning It Into a Movement
When the hashtag stops trending, what can be done to continue the movement? That was the topic tackled at the panel “When a Moment Becomes a Movement” at South by Southwest on Friday in Austin, Texas. The session was led by Cammie Croft, Amnesty International USA’s deputy executive director of digital and strategic communications. #BlackLivesMatter…
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Scandal: The ‘Let’s Catch Our Breath (Before We Get All Out of Breath Again)’ Episode
Every now and then, Scandal slows down long enough to let us catch our breath. After the multiepisode hostage arc and last week’s emotionally draining Ferguson, Mo.-inspired episode, this week’s installment simply laid down bricks for plotlines that are likely going to carry us through the rest of the season. Olivia slowly recovers…
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American Crime: Parental Denial and Children Living Lies
The episode opens with Carter and Aubry in their respective jail cells, wearing jumpsuits so trendy they look like a United Colors of Benetton ad. At the arraignment, the couple see each other for the first time since being arrested, and Carter is eye-boning his girlfriend instead of listening to the charges against him. Tony…