x-posted from TAPPED. Last month, Brookings released a report that showed poverty on the rise in suburbs, especially in the Midwest — now, suburbs have the largest share of the nation’s poor. Suburbs often don’t have the same same level of services that many cities do, and the absence of things like good public transportation alongside Read More
I’m kind of tired of the bourgie-black-parents-have-to-deal-with-their-kid-dating-interracially thing. A lot of the humor in Our Family Wedding (and Guess Who and Something New and hell, even that terrible MTV movie Love Song) seems to rest on the fact that the blacks! are! middle! class! With their cotillions and tennis and fancy cars! Look, Guess Who’s Read More
Cross-posted from TAPPED. Bloggers and columnists, in the flurry of predictions that come at the start of any new year, are wondering how we’ll consume media in 2010. What will be the new Twitter? Will any of it will be enough to save old media outlets? These questions are important, but it’s worth remembering that Read More
In a recently published study, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers assessed the subjective happiness of women and found that despite greater opportunities, higher wages and increased education, their perceived feelings of well-being have decreased steadily over the last 35 years. In addition they identified a widening gap in the levels of subjective happiness experienced by Read More
The story of Michael Oher’s intellectual development is also the story of his body type. Michael Oher is rare. Huge. A freak of nature. He’s also an anomaly of nurture and it has taken a village to raise him. The Blind Side by Michael Lewis chronicles Oher’s turbulent childhood, his unlikely ascent into professional football Read More
The following post was originally published in December 2007. We’re re-running it as it touches on a major component of our next Book of the Month pick, Michael Lewis’s The Blind Side. Michael Oher was born in the 1980s on the desperately poor, black side of Memphis. His father was murdered shortly after he was Read More
This month we’ll be reading The Blind Side by Michael Lewis. In an excerpt called “The Ballad of Big Mike,” Lewis tells the story of Michael Oher, an impoverished kid from Memphis who through a strange confluence of events ends up in the legal custody of a wealthy white family. At the time of his adoption Read More
Today in my office, a pimp and his prostitute came looking for advice on where to score some blow and advice on how to fill out their W-2s. When I told them what they could do, they accused me of encouraging them to engage in public masturbation. I hope Beck and Co. don’t get hold Read More
Believe it or not, I’ve been known to be a jackass. Ask anyone who had the misfortune of knowing me in college. Or a couple years ago. I really hope President Obama isn’t asked about it anytime soon: Anyway, lots of things have happened since our last Monday roundup. Here’s a few of them, a Read More
I’m probably gonna get pilloried for this by some folks, but I don’t care much for Spike Lee. Yeah, he’s talented and a pioneer and Do The Right Thing rightly deserves the praise it’s accorded. But the quality of his work varies too wildly, there’s a weird misogynistic streak in many of his films, and Read More
