culture
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Michelle Obama's Transcendent Moment
(The Root) — If it’s been true in past elections that what the average Joe Voter really wants is to share a beer with the president, then perhaps getting into a bar fight with the first lady will be 2016’s litmus test. As it stands, reaction to first lady Michelle Obama’s swift handling of a…
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Bye-Bye to Michele Bachmann's Twitter-Era Politics
Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page says goodbye and good riddance to the conservative Minnesota politician and her tactics. Rep. Michele Bachmann got it backwards in her surprising retirement announcement. Many of her “mainstream liberal media” critics will miss her, especially the fact-checkers. “I fully anticipate,” the Minnesota Republican declared in an eight-minute, 40-second, video, “the…
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Americans Can't Agree on How to Say Anything: These Maps Prove It
Joshua Katz, a Ph.D. student in statistics at North Carolina State University, has published a group of maps illustrating a linguistic survey of how Americans in different regions pronounce words (and, sometimes, differences in the actual words we use). There’s the expected “pop”-versus-“soda” divide and big regional variations in words like “caramel,” “been” and “pajamas.”…
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Multimillion-Dollar Mau Mau Settlement?
Decades after they suffered castration, rape and beating during a crackdown by British forces in Kenya, thousands of fighters from the Mau Mau movement who were tortured during the Kenyan “emergency” of 1952-1960 will finally be compensated, the Mail Online reports. Britain’s foreign office declined to comment on reports that the settlement — expected to…
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Proof That the War on Marijuana Is Racially Biased?
Whereas black and white Americans smoke marijuana at about the same rates, blacks are nearly four times more likely to be arrested for possession. The disparity isn’t limited to inner cities. And it’s widened even further over the past decade. Those are just a few of the conclusions reached in “The War on Marijuana in…
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Paris Jackson Reportedly Hospitalized
TMZ is reporting that Paris Jackson, the late Michael Jackson 15-year-old daughter, is OK after what unnamed sources allege was a possible suicide attempt. She was reportedly rushed from her family home in Calabasas, Calif., to the hospital Wednesday morning. An attorney for Katherine Jackson, Paris’ grandmother, told the website that “Paris is physically fine…
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Video Captures Police Brutally Beating Woman
In Jasper, Texas, a town with a history of racial unrest, two white police officers have been fired after they were captured on video slamming a black woman’s head into a countertop and wrestling her to the ground at the police headquarters, <a href=Yahoo reports. Keyarika “Shea” Diggles, 25, was brought to the jail on…
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Susan Rice to Be New National Security Adviser
Susan Rice rises again. The United Nations ambassador has been tapped to replace Tom Donilon, who is resigning, as President Obama’s national security adviser, according to the Washington Post. In December of 2012, she withdrew her name from consideration for secretary of state after Obama’s opponents accused her of misleading the public in the aftermath…
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Bradley Manning Needs a Plea Deal — Not Life in Jail
Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson argues that Army Pfc. Bradley Manning deserves to be punished — but not too severely. The treatment of Army Pfc. Bradley Manning has been excessively harsh, as far as I can tell. If he is found guilty of leaking more than 700,000 classified documents, he deserves some punishment — probably — but…
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My Kid Insists That I'm White, but I'm Not
(The Root) — “My 5-year-old daughter is convinced that I’m white. “I’m originally from the Dominican Republic and identify as black and Latina. Her biological father is from the Central African Republic, and she sees herself as black. “Just last weekend, we were at the Bed-Stuy fish fry and she said, ‘Mami, you know you…