Last week ari re-posted a smart blog entry on the Santa-fication of MLK, whose rough edges had been made smooth in our civic memory. He was despised while he was living, and his stances also confounded other leaders in the Civil Rights Movement, but little of that makes it into school textbooks. Rosa Parks has Read More
We’ve touched on the idea (and the holes in it) before, but the meme — the Obamas as an aspirational model for black families — has really started gaining steam. America has often viewed the black family through the prism of its pathologies: single-family homes, absentee fathers, out of wedlock children, they say. Or they’ve Read More
(Or maybe he really is magical.) Educators and policy makers, including Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, have said in recent days that they hope President Obama’s example as a model student could inspire millions of American students, especially blacks, to higher academic performance. Now researchers have documented what they call an Obama effect, showing that Read More
Stay classy, GOP.
How come nobody told us about this?
If seeing Michael on 90210 wasn’t heartbreaking enough, now we have a whole glut of Wire alumni popping up in some crappy-looking projects in the next few months. In 12 Rounds, Tommy Carcetti is one of those bad guys who can’t just shoot the protagonist, but instead has to lock the hero in a _____ Read More
I bet Steve Schmidt wants to murk somebody. How did their kinky sex life manage stay under wraps during the campaign?
When Bush flew out of D.C., his final approval numbers sat at an anemic 22 percent. But Cheney’s were even lower, at an almost unimaginable 13 percent. Obviously, Cheney had a large hand in shaping Bush administration policy on everything from wiretapping to torture — probably a more direct hand than Bush — but I’m Read More
Ta-Nehisi hits on one of my big beefs with ‘Friday Night Lights’: Racism runs through the heart of the book–racism towards blacks, racism towards Hispanics. But the writer still maintains an affection for the players, and to some extent, for the town. It’s amazing how the story went from a narrative of a West Texas Read More
So I finally got to see Notorious, and it wasn’t as bad as I initially guessed it would be. That doesn’t mean it was good. It was pretty formulaic, and offered a textbook example of why voiceover narration is evil and should be avoided at all costs. (WTF? Was Biggie narrating from beyond the grave???) Read More
