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SWPL’s Landler, from Heeb. Christian Lander, the guy behind Stuff White People Like, recently got a $300,000 book deal from Random House. The book is due out in August. We’re not sure what that means, really. Just throwing it out there.

It seemed so long ago when Allen Iverson came from the South to save my racially polarized hometown from basketball ruin. But how could this barely six foot, barely 165-pound phenom be entrusted with such responsibility? He was racial polarization incarnate. At 17, he was involved in a brawl in a bowling alley that allegedly Read More

We have a rough (if slightly problematic) idea of what is generally used to define poverty for statistical purposes. Sociologists tend to define the middle class largely in terms of rough lifestyle — access to credit, property ownership, higher education (or the realistic expectation of it), savings accounts, etc. But, off the top of your Read More

I was at work when a friend told me that Brett Favre was retiring. My first instinct when someone drops a sports-related bombshell on me is to dart over to ESPN. Not this time. “Great,” I responded. “Now I have to stay away from ESPN for a day or so.” But a day was hardly Read More

This year marks the 35th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, and its lesser-known cousin, Doe v. Bolton (both were pseudonyms, lest you think it’s crazy that two women named Doe and Roe were at the Supreme Court at the same time.) The arguments on whether or not abortion should be legal have taken a backseat Read More

Discussions of class differences among black people invariably become about how the educated and privileged are morally upstanding and how those who aren’t flawed and embarassing. Even when it’s toungue-in-cheek. So if we were ambivalent about StuffWhitePeopleLike, we’re positively cringing at this site. UPDATE: We’re not alone. Racialicious‘s Latoya Peterson noted the weirdness in the Read More

Barbara Ehrenreich penned an influential and oft-cited 2001 book called Nickel and Dimed, in which she decides to shed some of the privileges of her middle class life (author, college professor, etc.) to see if it was really possible to live in the U.S. on the minimum wage. Her experiment went on for a year, Read More

Brown University is following the lead of academic powerhouses Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth and Stanford in ending tuition for middle income and poor students. They also intend to place student loans with grants so those same students aren’t saddled with so much debt. The cost of tuition and room and board at Brown for the 2008-09 Read More

The increasingly fervent folks over at Jack & Jill have decided they were through with New York Times columnist and Princeton economist Paul Krugman for his criticism of Barack Obama. Didactic as he can be sometimes (and what columnist isn’t?), he is often very, very right. America’s failure to make progress in reducing poverty, especially Read More

Yesterday we linked to a roundtable (yeah, yeah, we know) on NPR’s News and Notes moderated by Farai Chideya. During the conversation, Desmond Burton, a.k.a. Afronerd, made a comment about the shooting death of Tarika Wilson by a SWAT team, associating Wilson’s name and biography with the sad end of her life. Burton: … In Read More

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