My first time performing was in the black box theater of my high school's basement as a member of 'Clownaz,' the school's improv team. We charged money for tickets, saying the proceeds went to our school's recycling program. Then, immediately after t...
Back in the 1970s, Kodak tried to give $25m to a black civil rights organisation in Rochester, New York. The company's shareholders rose up in arms: making this politically charged offering wasn't the reason they had entrusted Kodak with their money....
And my father didn't have money for me to go to college. And at that particular time they didn't have black quarterbacks, and I don't think I could have made it in basketball, because I was only 5' 11". So I just picked baseball.
During one new moon at perigee, I stood on high ground, watching salt ponds overflow, cover the beach, and meet the ocean. Because the moon was invisible, the water was black as it drowned the sand, and the event felt primal - which in fact it was, b...
Populists have always been out to challenge the orthodoxy of the corporate order and to empower workaday Americans so they can control their own economic and political destinies. This approach distinguishes the movement from classic liberalism, which...
Lamentably, alien audiences may be frustrated by the switch to digital television. That's because the transmitter power for DTV is fairly evenly spread across the spectrum. The spikiness is gone, and from afar, the attention-grabbing squeals of analo...
Whether the issue was black political power or nuclear power, Scott-Heron didn't mince words. His comeback record, 'I'm New Here,' doesn't mince words either, but instead of political battles, these songs suggest he's fighting personal ones.
As a child and a teenager, my attitudes and actions assumed the superiority of my race in almost every way without knowing or wanting to know anybody who was black, except Lucy. Lucy came to our house on Saturdays to help my mother clean. I liked Luc...
Being black, Latino, or Asian is not a genre. Romantic comedies, thrillers, action - those are genres. I think there's a lot of people who want to have the conversation. I don't think people are afraid of it, I just think it's the time to have that c...
At one time, you could sit on the Rue de la Paix in Paris or at the Habima Theater in Tel Aviv or in Medina and you could see a person come in, black, white, it didn't matter. You said, 'That's an American' because there's a readiness to smile and to...
I am angry about the mammoth, out-of-control social welfare entitlement programs from Washington, D.C., that were supposed to solve our problems. The obvious truth is these impractical, politically motivated programs have irreparably damaged the fabr...
The Zionists indeed learnt well from the Nazis. So well that it seems that their morally repugnant treatment of the Palestinians, and their attempts to destroy Palestinian society within Israel and the occupied territories, reveals them as basically ...
I believe that the whole idea of the consumer society is tottering. We've kept ourselves going by producing more and more goods, most of which people don't need. I'm anti-consumerism; I own four pairs of black Levis and that's it.
Society in the English countryside is still strangely, quaintly divided. If black comedy and a certain type of social commentary are what you want, I think English rural communities offer quite a lot of material.
The first programming assignment I had in high school was to find the first 100 Fibonacci numbers. Instead, I thought it would be cooler to write a program to get the teacher's password and all the other students' passwords. And the teacher gave me a...
An asteroid or a supervolcano could certainly destroy us, but we also face risks the dinosaurs never saw: An engineered virus, nuclear war, inadvertent creation of a micro black hole, or some as-yet-unknown technology could spell the end of us.
I had written a tune called 'Shake, Rattle and Roll,' but the white stations refused to play it - they thought it was low-class black music. We thought what we needed was a new name. But a white disc jockey named Alan Freed laid on it, and he thought...
I think that American music, for me, it's a synthesis of a lot of different things. But for me growing up in North Carolina, the stuff that I was listening to, the things that I was hearing, it was all about black music, about soul music.
I didn't like any British music before The Beatles. For me, it was all about black American music. But then I became a successful pop singer, even though the kind of music I liked was more elitist, which is what I'm trying to get back to.
One day in 1984, at the height of his fame, Michael Jackson made a visit to the White House. President and Nancy Reagan may not have dug his music, but they understood the power Mr. Jackson commanded as a common pop-cultural touchstone for just about...
I'll get up in the morning while they've all got hangovers and run my 5 miles. But the women who do run are usually 10 years younger than me and they're really obsessed about running. That's all they do. They're really boring.
