culture

It looks as if Tyler Perry is going to get another opportunity to show his range as an actor. Director David Fincher has cast Perry in his next film, Gone Girl, which, according to Deadline, starts filming this fall. Perry will star opposite Ben Affleck and Neil Patrick Harris. Fincher has set Tyler Perry to play Tanner…

(The Root) — Earlier this week the Washington Post published a list of “The 10 D.C. Guys We’ve All Dated.” It included “the chill Republican dude” who wears shirts with whales on them, “the organic kale guy” who makes homemade quiche and “the Clarendon guy” who downs shots of Fireball and never misses brunch. While…

A Colorado Republican state representative reignited controversy on Wednesday when she brought a box of fried chicken to a poverty hearing, Fox31 Denver reports. The incident comes about two weeks after state Sen. Vicki Marble, a fellow Republican and poverty task force member, riled lawmakers when she identified chicken as one of the reasons for…

At the New York Times, professor of philosophy George Yancy writes an incisive piece about white people’s fear of blacks, which he says is global and has origins in Europe. For centuries, black people have been reduced to constricting and false stereotypes that force them to move through social spaces in a way designed to put…

While we want sports to be fair, sometimes what we observe “is a contest among wildly disparate groups of people, who approach the starting line with an uneven set of genetic endowments and natural advantages,” Malcolm Gladwell writes at the New Yorker in a penetrating examination of David Epstein’s book The Sport Gene. [David] Epstein tells the…

Phill Branch, writing at Shadow and Act, worries that Miley Cyrus’ twerking debacle could lead to random acts of “blackness” by whites. “I just hope it doesn’t lead to me being twerked at without my permission,” he writes. The moment Hoda Kotb or Barbara Walters grabs hold of some formerly underground colloquialism or dance move,…

(The Root) — In the eponymous biopic Winnie Mandela, Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson has mastered a new art form: emoji acting. With a stilted script, distracting soundtrack and costume changes rivaling Liberace’s, Hudson’s Winnie has little to do in the movie except look at things. Winnie Mandela, which opens Friday, is the first of two…

(The Root) — For many young brides, having a wedding featured in the New York Times wedding announcements is a dream come true. But having one of your most private secrets revealed is a nightmare. In the case of one bride, however, she chose to share one of her most private secrets in her wedding…

Stephen Colbert, host of Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, on Tuesday voiced strong criticism of a potential U.S. strike in Syria, according to the Huffington Post. He issued a stern challenge to the U.S. to deal with gun violence at home before venturing abroad to help other countries. “The United States has no choice but…

Under pressure from online critics, a 30-year-old Tallahassee, Fla., man deleted GhettoTracker.com, his crowd-sourcing experiment “in travel guide segregation,” Gawker reports. Users who navigate to the site receive the following message: “This site is gone. It’s not worth the trouble.” In an effort to save face after the GhettoTracker uproar, the creator put up Good Part…