culture

Brown v. Board of Education—the landmark Supreme Court ruling that desegregated public schools—turns 60 this year, and if someone were tasked with identifying the most interesting parts of the case in order to repurpose it for a Law & Order special, what would that episode look like? Who were the major characters? Which one of…

A Maryland man who took his unresponsive 3-year-old son to the hospital earlier this year is now in custody on first-degree child-abuse and manslaughter charges, WUSA-9 reports. Police believe that Thomas Everett Holland, 38, gave the child lethal amounts of cocaine, acetaminophen and codeine after autopsy and toxicology reports showed that the child could not have…

A mother whose 5-year-old son was shot in the arm during a Mother’s Day shootout in the Richmond, Va., project where they live told NBC 12 that she would rather be homeless than move back there with her child. Tiara Saunders has only been home to the Whitcomb Court housing projects once, to gather clothes…

Florida State quarterback Jameis Winston didn’t protest when he was caught stealing more than $30 worth of crab legs from a Florida grocery store, and now the video shows why. Security-camera footage from the Publix supermarket, released Thursday by the Leon County Sheriff’s Office in Tallahassee, Fla., shows exactly what happened that day in April…

Here we go again. Someone in a position of authority has said something racist. More specifically, something racist about President Barack Obama, and gotten caught. Only this time the person didn’t make a fried-chicken or watermelon joke, or call the commander in chief “boy.” He actually used the n-word. And did I mention this authority…

Looks like Donald Sterling will not go quietly into the night, since the embattled Los Angeles Clippers owner is refusing to pay the $2.5 million that he has been fined, and his newly hired attorney has sent a letter to the NBA threatening to sue, ESPN.com reports. According to SI.com, Sterling’s lawyer, Max Blecher, sent…

Columbus Short, the controversial former star of Scandal, made a brief appearance in a California court to plead not guilty to felony battery charges for allegedly knocking a man unconscious in a bar brawl in West Hollywood in March. Short, who has been the subject of many news reports since it was announced that he…

In the almost all-white town of Wolfeboro, N.H., resident Jane O’Toole was in a restaurant in March when, she says, she overheard the police commissioner use the n-word. She wrote the town manager about the language. Wolfeboro Police Commissioner Robert Copeland wrote her back acknowledging that he’d called the president the n-word and adding that…

John A. Stokes, a 19-year-old high school senior, and his schoolmates were sweltering. In the tar paper shacks they called classrooms, there was no indoor plumbing or running water. The tar paper provided no insulation and sometimes even failed to keep out the rain. Conditions weren’t much better during winter, when a single wood-stoked, potbellied…