Uncategorized
-
Black Male Suicide
Not long ago, suicide and African Americans were almost never mentioned in the same breath. Despite confronting challenges from slavery to Jim Crow to structural racism, blacks rarely took their own lives. It was a positive health disparity. Until now. There is alarming evidence that the suicide rate for young African-American men is escalating, and…
-
We Are All Wasillans Now
I’m an Alaskan. I grew up in Wasilla. Sarah Palin was my mayor. She explored the idea of banning books at the library where my parents taught me how to read. There have been many interesting pieces of journalism introducing my gun-toting, moose burger-eating former neighbors to the rest of the country, and most have…
-
An Appetite for Hunger
To most everyone, the prototypical sufferer is an insecure, sickly-thin, young, white woman who looks in the mirror and sees a fat girl. It is Karen Carpenter, singing the sad songs of the 1970s as she starved herself and finally died in 1983. It is so many Hollywood actresses, splashed across magazine covers, their pretty…
-
Trading O.J.
On the day of his induction into Pro-Football Hall Of Fame in 1985, O.J. Simpson should have said to the crowd in Canton, Ohio: “Thank you guys so much….This is great,” then turned, taken one last look at his old life, draped his yellow blazer across his broad shoulders, hopped on his spaceship and flew…
-
Black Family Seeks Nanny
Some women think their kids can do no wrong, while others are brutally honest: “My kids are a pain,” began Rebecca Land Soodak, in the advertisement she recently posted on craigslist, in search of the perfect nanny for her Manhattan-based family of five. “If you cannot multitask or communicate without being passive aggressive, don’t even…
-
Chicago Hope
Cross-town rivalries are an essential part of baseball lore. During the ’50s, the World Series often came down to a matchup between the Brooklyn Dodgers or New York Giants and the New York Yankees. The Bay area has had its two teams, the San Francisco Giants and Oakland A’s battle in the World Series in…
-
Test post
Test post: The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. And then he jumped over it again. More after the (har) jump. Covers the White House and Washington for The Root. Follow her on Twitter.
-
Crumbling Under Crisis
It’s difficult to remember just how ho-hum the political stakes felt in the 1990s, a time when our country’s prosperity and stability made leadership seem secondary to things like ideology, faith and personality. People who came of age in that era could still debate deep, academic questions like whether history is shaped by the person…
-
Save Haiti, Plant Trees
Every hurricane season, Haitians at home and abroad gird themselves for the inevitable loss of life that comes with the torrential rains and winds. But this season has been especially hard, as one storm after another has battered the island, leaving death and destruction in their wake. Tropical Storm Fay struck in mid-August. Hurricane Gustav…
-
The Double Talk Express
“He was wearing my Harvard tie. Can you believe it—my Harvard tie? Like, ‘Oh, sure,’ he went to Harvard.” —Winthorpe (Dan Aykroyd) from Trading Places (1983) All summer long, John McCain has been selling the idea that a guy who graduated at the top of his Harvard Law class, who went from living on food…