culture

While President Barack Obama touted the success of Mitt Romney’s health care model in Boston this week, it remains unclear whether its results can be replicated in Obamacare, Gabrielle Gurley writes at the Guardian. President Obama parachuted into Boston this week to wax nostalgic about Massachusetts healthcare reform. Flanked by his good friend Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick and…

American shoppers spend about 18 percent of all food stamp dollars at Walmart, one of the nation’s most profitable companies, the Huffington Post reports. That adds up to an estimated $14 billion of the $80 billion Congress set aside for food stamps last year, the site says. The company’s total profits for 2013 were $17 billion. The…

Actor Kevin Hart has found his raison d’être. The Philadelphia native recently donated $250,000 to the city’s struggling school system, according to Hello Beautiful. “I found my lane, helping my city,” the site quotes Hart as saying. “That’s my lane, trying to put my city on my back, uplift it and showing these kids that…

On the eve of Kerry Washington’s appearance on Saturday Night Live, founding producer Lorne Michaels responded to rising complaints about the dearth of black female comedians on the show, the Associated Press reports. Currently no black women are among the 16 repertory or featured players on the show. The most recent, and most prominent, woman…

Ladies in Opa-locka, Fla., are going to have to pull their pants up after lawmakers voted recently to extend a six-year-old sagging pants ban to women, the Miami Herald reports. City commissioners, the Herald reports, tentatively approved the ordinance authorizing police to issue citations to women for wearing pants that expose any underwear or undergarments.…

Just in time for the holidays, federal cuts to the food stamp program will kick in. And Bob Aiken, chief executive of the nonprofit Feeding America, writes at CNN that the changes “are significant and will put a strain on millions of families struggling with food insecurity.” The upcoming cuts will result in an increased…

The Washington Post‘s Jonathan Capehart takes the Republican Party to task for its continual disrespect of President Barack Obama. “I’m old enough to remember the days when an invitation to the White House to meet with the president was a clear-your-calendar occasion. Not anymore.” President Obama can’t win. On the one hand, he is a…

Writing at Salon, Roxane Gay explores modern-day racism and dismisses exhortations by whites that blacks simply “get over” it. She asks how this implausible request can be accomplished when racism is flourishing and silently condoned by some whites. A couple of weeks ago, I was in the Dallas Fort Worth airport with a long layover.…

A group of African-American men are claiming that the staff and security at the Barclays Center arena in Brooklyn, N.Y., have given them shoddy treatment, accused them of skipping out on bills and even had security rush what they believed was their luxury box, the New York Post reports. The three men, Glen DeFreitas, Sean…