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Manny Pacquiao Homophobia Echoes Holyfield, Tyson
Filipino boxer Manny Pacquiao leaves little doubt he simply hates gay people. First, the boxer compared gay people to animals. Or rather Pacquiao used animals as an illustration of the perversity of...
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Original Aunt Viv Beefing With Will and Jada Smith
Whatever you think of the #sowhiteoscars protest, this was the most incredible, the most sensational, the most epic shade thrown in black Hollywood. In mid-January Janet Hubert, aka Aunt Viv on The...
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Bernie Sanders First White Guy Endorsed by The Nation
Timing is everything, so the saying goes. For Bernie Sanders, the timing could not be better. Polls have The Bern up in both Iowa and New Hampshire. He’s had major profiles in news magazines. Now, he’s...
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Dana Gioia California Poet Laureate a Win for Arts in America
It slipped under the radar but it is unsurpassingly good news for poetry: the poet, critic, and arts administrator Dana Gioia has been made poet laureate of California. Poet laureate positions don’t...
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Great Year For Black Literature, If Not Black America
The novelist Ralph Ellison gave black writers a specific cultural charge. To wit, in Invisible Man: “Our task is that of making ourselves individuals. The conscience of a race is the gift of its...
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Is Patti Labelle Truly ‘Petty Patti’ — or Not?
It was the YouTube video seen around the world. It has more than 3 million views. It had Walmart selling out of unusually bright orange sweet potato pies one recent weekend and beyond. That’s right:...
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Ralph Ellison’s Progeny Prominent At National Book Awards
Veteran watchers of the National Book Awards will note the first black writer to receive the prestigious award: Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man (1954). The award was a boon for Ellison...
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Nas At Harvard — Setting Hip-Hop’s Parameters
For a while now, hip-hop has undergone a steady acceptance as the cultural monument to black urban life and as a serious poetical art. Not only in anthologies of its key masters, biopics such as...
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Milan Kundera vs. Yale School of Music
Recently, Yale music dean Robert Blocker was quoted in The New York Times dismissing jazz as something apart from the Western canon. “Our mission is real clear,” Robert Blocker said about the Yale...
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Ta-Nehisi Coates and Toni Morrison
What’s the Difference between a Slight and a Tribute? The Case of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Toni Morrison The New York Times Magazine has a new feature where notable people list the 10 books they would take...
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Cornel West’s Ta-Nehisi Coates Problem: Pure Envy?
Come to think of it, Georgetown professor and MSNBC personality Michael Eric Dyson had a point several months back in The New Republic. Today, Cornel West has proven it. On Facebook, West rips...
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Gunther Schuller and the Crisis of Jazz Criticism
The world has been praising Gunther Schuller for his wide-ranging contributions to the world of music. If not exactly a force of nature, or in the heroic mold of the great classical composers and...
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The Death of Jazz Has Been Greatly Exaggerated: Ornette Coleman, RIP
Frequently, it is said jazz is dead. The music no longer caters to an audience willing to endure its complexity when pop offers so much more in passive, easy, listenable entertainment. Jazz, say these...
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Peter Gay Is (Sadly) History
Peter Gay was an urbane gent, according to the obituaries but he was also a great historian, perhaps not in the grand mode of an Edward Gibbon or Henry Adams, but nonetheless a historian of such...
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Who Was Michael Eric Dyson Talking To?
When Georgetown professor and MSNBC pundit Michael Eric Dyson wrote his reply to the criticisms of his anti-Cornel West philippic, he addressed the most important question about the contradictory...
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The New ‘New Republic’ vs. Cornel West, Round 2
Oh, you assumed things would be different. Last year around its 100th anniversary, The New Republic had the greatest and most dramatic departure from its masthead in the history of small magazines....
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What Does Kanye West’s Influence Mean?
Kanye West is having a good year. He was invited to Oxford University, a world-class meeting place of the exceptionally brilliant and creative. His fashion career, while not totally convincing, has...
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Billie Holiday At 100 — The Art Over The Life
Today is the centennial of Billie Holiday’s birth. Already, jazz media has remarked upon the tragic glaze that runs through her life and art. That’s cliché territory. When her art is examined, the...
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Lauryn Hill Makes Surprise Appearance At Library Of Congress
The Library of Congress has announced its annual list of National Recording Registry selections. It contained a surprise: Lauryn Hill’s The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill. The august institution would...
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It’s James Madison’s 264th Birthday — Warts And All
Today would be James Madison 264th birthday. Madison is universally known by the sobriquet “Father of the Constitution” because he did most of the grunt work in getting that document signed, sealed,...
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