culture

Morgan Freeman must have done a brilliant job as Nelson Mandela in the 2009 film Invictus—maybe a little too brilliant. That’s because the makers of a billboard in India actually believed the actor to be the former South African president and mistakenly used a photo of Freeman, the New York Daily News reports. Below Freeman’s…

The family of a 13-year-old girl who was declared brain-dead after having surgery to remove her tonsils is asking that doctors not take her off life support until after the holidays, CBS News reports. The family’s attorney, Christopher Dolan, said Thursday that Jahi McMath’s family will meet with officials at Oakland Children’s Hospital to make…

The 45-year-old man who shot and killed Renisha McBride, an unarmed teen who was seeking help after a car accident, will stand trial on second-degree murder and manslaughter charges, a Michigan judge decided on Thursday, MSNBC reports. Judge David Turfe said Thursday that based on the evidence, Theodore Wafer made a poor decision in shooting McBride.…

The Garden in Winter Here is what I do when I look out the window and see my garden buried under three feet of snow: I think of the gardens and the plants I saw in them, or the plants I saw in the wild. In August I was in Daniel J. Hinkley’s garden, where…

President Obama announced on Thursday that he will be commuting the sentences of eight crack-cocaine offenders who were given extremely lengthy prison terms basically for being black and possessing a drug whose users are incorrectly perceived to be majority black. We can stammer around the issue, but ever since crack cocaine entered urban cities during…

Left of Black host Mark Anthony Neal is joined by vocalist Nnenna Freelon and John Brown to talk about their seasonal jazz collaboration, entitled Christmas, and how the death of Freelon’s parents motivated her album. Watch the interview here:

It’s not exactly a shock that Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson is embracing his inner homophobe. After all, he’s a self-proclaimed “Bible-thumper” who sees his hit reality-TV series as a vehicle for delivering “the good news about Jesus” to folks, “whether they’re homosexuals, drunks, terrorists.” So when he emptied both his barrels in the pages of…

President Obama is expected to commute the sentences of eight federal inmates who were convicted of crack-cocaine offenses, expanding the president’s push to curb severe penalties for drug offenses, the New York Times reports. The prisoners, all of whom have been locked away for at least 15 years, are expected to be released in the…

An African-American Sacramento State University student has the school in an uproar after she simulated two white men being lynched from a tree on campus for an art project focusing on civil rights. The two men, who had actual nooses hung around their necks, are fine. They are hired actors who were suspended from the…