culture

The Detroit News is reporting that Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr says the city’s cash-flow crisis makes it “insolvent” and unable to borrow more money to cover its debts. The situation is being made worse by the skipped millions of dollars in payments to retiree pensions and health care plans. Detroit Mayor Dave Bing, who, along…

(The Root) — In the search for clues about our ancestral roots, answers can lie in the stories of those to whom we are not related by blood. The following reader wonders if that is the case for her. “I am white, and occasionally my family history intersects with African-American families, especially in New Jersey.…

(The Root) — Spelman College’s 2013 co-valedictorians, Kirstie and Kristie Bronner, come from a long line of success as part of America’s prominent family of hair-care entrepreneurs. Their father, Bishop Dale Bronner, is the pastor at one of the largest churches in Atlanta, and both their mother and grandmother preceded them as graduates of the…

(The Root) — This image is part of a weekly series that The Root is presenting in conjunction with the Image of the Black in Western Art Archive at Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. In the spring of 1866, just one year after the conclusion of the U.S. Civil War, the young Swiss…

Writing at the Washington Post, Jamelle Bouie predicts that reaction to the Internal Revenue Service’s reported targeting of conservative groups is more likely to result in a “scandal circus” than in a serious look at the 501(c)4 designation. Already, there are calls for investigations, resignations, and new legislation. At Slate, David Weigel reports that Ohio…

(The Root) — Nothing should surprise me about rapper Snoop Dogg — or, er, Snoop Lion, as he recently rebranded himself in what seems to be a midlife crisis. This is a man who launched his career 20 years ago with an album cover for the now-classic Doggystyle that featured an image of a hybrid…

Brentin Mock writes at Colorlines about journalist and documentarian Deborah “Big Red” Cotton, who has expressed her concern about New Orleans violence and also her compassion and love for black men in the city, who are too often the perpetrators and victims of that violence. Journalist and documentarian Deborah “Big Red” Cotton was one of…

Slate‘s Aisha Harris predicts that the film about the last day in the life of Oscar Grant — who was fatally shot by a police officer in Oakland, Calif. — will be both powerful and unsettling. Shot on location in Oakland, Fruitvale Station, the feature debut of director Ryan Coogler, takes place on the last…