After reading the homie Frannie Kelley’s glowing review of the original cast soundtrack for Hamilton, the much-hyped hip-hop-meets-American-history musical by the newly minted genius Lin-Manuel Miranda, I decided to give it a listen. Sigh. So over the last few days, I have been banging this in the crib loudly — like, really, really loudly — and Read More
A few years back, I was walking down 16th Street in Philly with Tracy when I nudged her to walk with me to my old elementary school on Lombard Street. It was still there, looking all austere and gray-brown like any proper century-old Philadelphia public school building. It seemed much smaller now that I was grown. But that’s Read More
On a recent two-part story on This American Life, Nikole Hannah-Jones of The New York Times Magazine went to Normandy High School — the struggling St. Louis County school from which Michael Brown graduated just weeks before he was killed last year in Ferguson. Normandy is the lowest-ranked high school in Missouri and nearly entirely Read More
Terryn is packing up and moving to the D for a new gig! To help get her ready, we convened some folks who have Big Thoughts about the state of the blackest city in America. Angela Flournoy, a PBer and the author of the critically acclaimed new novel, The Turner House, set her book in Read More
G.D. and Terryn discuss his recent reporting for NPR’s Code Switch on the Confederate flag — the black folks who side-eye the flag but don’t really care too much and the white folks who make the argument that the flag is about heritage. Terryn breaks down what well-meaning Northerners (like G.D.) don’t get about the South. She also Read More
G.D. went home to Philly last week to try and fill in some blanks in my understanding of the police bombing of Osage Avenue back in 1985.
So this post got me thinking about the peculiarities of Rosie’s fame. She was, quite literally, the opening number in one of America’s all-time-great movies. She was the brains behind the Fly Girls. She was — is – a sex symbol. She’s been ubiquitious and beloved and an avatar of legitimacy even though she’s never exactly been Read More
Serena Jameka Williams of Compton, Calif., is America’s greatest active athlete. You know how it goes — an army of contemporaries, but no peers. Sorta like Bey, I guess.
Jay says we should ask ourselves: “If my defense of racism was a Robin Thicke song, would I get sued for it?”
