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So You Think You Can Dance?
Point me t’ward tomorrow We did what we had to do. Won’t forget, can’t regret What I did for love. —“What I Did For Love,” from A Chorus Line A dancer’s life is famously short, brutal and riddled with potential pitfalls: ripped Achilles tendons, torn hamstrings, stress fractures, cruel choreographers. There is drama and angst…
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Obama: First Guest
President Obama repped quite nicely on Jay Leno’s “Tonight Show” last night. He caught some flack for doing a TV show, but at least he’s not reading from the funny pages, like Franklin Roosevelt often did when he was on the radio. I understand the objections, though. There was room to crash and burn, but…
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How I Survived the 1980s
Earlier this week, one reader Calvin – a veteran of the U.S. Navy – told us how disappointing his job search was and how he didn’t want to work a low-paying job outside his ideal career path. He was bitter about how being marred by debt and not reaping the benefits a college degree is supposed to provide. …
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Young Blacks and Broken Hearts
The New England Journal of Medicine has an arresting study that finds blacks under the age of 50 are 20 times more likely to develop heart disease than whites. Here’s the abstract, for geeks, and an AP digest for everybody else. I’ll repeat what the researchers stress here: the finding is based on a small…
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Fire Geithner First
“I don’t know karate—but I know cr-azy.” —James Brown The Washington Post’s Steven Pearlstein finally said the F-word. Fraud. While Congress and the Treasury mull over approaches to the financial crisis with exotic names like “cram down,” “claw back” and “disgorgement,” and tax AIG executives “1000 percent” on their $160 million in bonuses, Pearlstein posed…
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Incredible Hulks
Click here to read a slide-show essay about the architecture of Detroit.
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Broadsheetless in Seattle?
Seattle, city of iconoclasts and wired pioneers, is embarking on a new frontier in journalism, as the home of the first major metropolitan daily, the Seattle Post Intelligencer, switches from print to an entirely online format—a bold, economically driven departure in publishing, and one that is already being closely watched by media companies and analysts.…
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Courage Under Fire
On Sept. 14, 2001, Congresswoman Barbara Lee took a stand. In the hectic, fear-filled days after the 9/11 attacks on the United States, she was the only member of the House of Representatives to vote against the Authorization for the Use of Military Force Against Terrorists. Lee, now serving her sixth term, has been one…
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Shop 'Til You Drop The Price
As expected, responses to the suggestion that people stop shopping altogether for a while in order to save money contained the same level of enthusiasm as a vegan would have after being offered neck bones and ox tails. Most of the “you must be crazy” reactions came from women – although let me say, before…
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Thursday's Headlines
BBC: Israeli Soldiers Admit Gaza Abuses; Israel Claims, ‘But They’re Not Really People, Ya Know’? CNN: Bin Laden May or May Not Have Come Out with New Mixtape; SoundScan Has Been Weak of Late SJMN: Richard Aoki, Charter Member of Black Panthers, Dies in Berkeley NYT: Heart Failure Strikes Black More Often and at Younger…