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The Purpose-Driven Campaign
Who in the heck is Pastor Rick Warren, and how did he get so much clout? Where did he get the power—and gall—to dragoon Barack Obama and John McCain into his mega-church this past Saturday night and submit them to back-to-back, hour-long, televised grillings about their moral and religious beliefs? This is the kind of…
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It Breaks A Village
“You want it to be one way. But it’s the other way.” —Marlo —Hillary Clinton hasn’t crossed the Rubicon yet, but let’s just say that her advance team is fashioning a drawbridge and the plebes are being told to take shelter behind the city walls. Next week in Denver, Sen. Clinton and former president Bill…
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Debatable Choices
In case you missed it, earlier this month, the Commission on Presidential Debates announced their picks to moderate the three presidential debates this fall. The chosen: NBC’s Tom Brokaw, CBS’s Bob Schieffer and PBS’s Jim Lehrer. So, in an election year in which race, gender and generational change have dominated politics and public discourse, the…
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Tibet: Not Just for Olympic-Themed Protests
Activity in the Barkhor, a vibrant and bustling area in Lhasa, courses steady and strong like blood running through veins. I, on the other hand, needed red blood cells, any red blood cells, during my travels there. At 12,000 feet above sea level, the decreased oxygen in the air left me feeling car sick, hung…
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The Ties That Bind
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told us last weekend that America’s AIDS epidemic is 40 percent larger than it had believed, and that black America accounts for about 45 percent of new infections each year. If we’re only 13 percent of the population, how can that be? There’s no one simple answer.…
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Killer Stigma
Ainsley Reid is the face of HIV/AIDS in Jamaica. Smiling in a bright yellow shirt under the words “Positive Truly Positive,” Reid, 43, is part of a campaign on the island to raise awareness about HIV and fight the stigma and discrimination. On posters, billboards and television ads, he looks strong and healthy and is,…
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How Can You Access Blocked Web Sites in China?
With the Olympics underway, Americans are devoting countless hours to Googling their favorite athletes and using the Web to find out all they can about China. But how free are people in China to interact online with fellow citizens and the world? How easy is it to surf the Web in China? The Chinese government…
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No Guts, No Glory
First things first: Ben Stiller’s new movie Tropic Thunder, is neither as offensive as some feared nor as wry as I had personally (perversely?) hoped. In an age where repetitive, moronic attacks on the dignity of various groups are often met by tactical shows of manufactured outrage, Thunder, with its kitchen-sink jumble of provocations—blackface, Jewface,…
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State of the Art
Making films is hard and making good ones even harder, so the American Black Film Festival, held last weekend in Los Angeles, adheres to the old adage that 90 percent of life is just showing up. To paraphrase a panelist during one of the festival’s events, “I’ve seen Citizen Kane and that shit was boring.…
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The Rays’ Cinderella Season
Nearly every year, some baseball team has a Cinderella season, rising from the depths of many losing or mediocre seasons and jostling among the perennial contenders for first place. But no team fits the metaphor as well as this year’s edition of the Tampa Bay Rays. The Rays, who changed their name from Devil Rays…