the browntable

By now you’ve probably at least heard about Old Spice’s uber-viral Old Spice Guy ad campaign. It’s so simple and successful that Gillette is probably rubbing a Mach3 on its wrists as I type this: A well-built, often shirtless black man (Isaiah Mustafa) demonstrates his virility to women with a series of romantic, sometimes magical…

On the 512th day of his presidency, Barack Obama used his first Oval Office address to try and allay the nation’s fears about the countless barrels of oil currently spilling into the Gulf of Mexico, what he termed the “worst environmental disaster” in American history. Though the president prefaced things by saying he intended to…

While speaking last evening with a friend, I fell upon the realization that, besides hundreds of years of financial, emotional and political strife, slavery has also engendered in the African American community a difficulty watching the World Cup. Before I encounter the faceless rage of The Internet, let me preface the rest of this post…

It seems as if Barack Obama’s reaction to the Gulf oil spill thus far has closely followed the famous Kübler-Ross model of grief management. Denial was when he waited far too long to take the reins from BP, thus allowing the company to flail about helplessly for days while little to no real action took…

Yesterday, South Carolina Democratic Party representative Todd Rutherford told reporters that the increasingly strange Alvin Greene saga was “not even funny, it’s just sad.” It’s a sentiment that’s becoming increasingly common, as Greene, the surprise winner of South Carolina’s Democratic Senate primary, finds himself ever-deeper in the muddy water that is American politics. Despite the…

Last April, I snapped this photo of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, mortal enemies turned thick as thieves at the White House. In the year since, I’ve lugged the same tools—recorder, camera, notepad, pens—around DC for this fine magazine, in search of words worth the thousand you see here. Starting next month, I’ll be doing…

I have been thoroughly enjoying Chris Wilson’s five-part Slate series on how social networking, not hierarchical flow charts, helped the United States military capture Saddam Hussein in 2003: Russell’s files reveal why it was essential to think of the insurgency as a social network, not an organization. Power was decentralized. And since the primary motive…

Addressing an international crowd at the Newseum in Washington, the United States’ shrine to a free press and an open society, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered a landmark speech on internet freedoms and digital democracy. She announced a $15 billion committment to helping developing and developed nations around the world empower citizens—especially young people…

In light of the current economic climate – while chewing on recent Republican, populist-tinged victories in New Jersey, Virginia and, most recently, Massachusetts – the question regarding African American support for President Obama is bound to come up.  It’s the anniversary of his first full year in office, we prognosticators expecting it.  But, it’s an…

With a Haitian disaster, two wars and a financial crisis on his plate, president Barack Obama nonetheless took time to remember Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the history of the civil rights movement. The president and his family, accompanied by White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett and Joshua DuBois, executive director of the Office…