Obama was elected in a flourish of promise that many in the African-American community believed would help not only to symbolize African-American progress since the Civil War and Civil Rights Acts but that his presidency would result in doors opening...
As for facial hair, I think I decided it was a good look after graduate school. I always shave it myself and trim my own beard. I change the look depending on the role. For 'Million Dollar Baby,' I had no facial hair. For 'Men in Black 3,' I had no f...
What I found fascinating was just how quickly the best of the young Negro League players were drafted into the major leagues once Branch Rickey broke the color line by hiring Jackie Robinson. It was clear that all of the major league owners already k...
We all need to know how to cook. I can buy a chicken and have many meals come from it. Is it affordable? Yes. Cheap? No. I want to pay the farmers the right price for food. They deserve it. They are the most important people in the country besides ou...
Barack Obama's administration responded to the Haitian crisis within 24 hours. Here comes the soldiers, here comes the food, go go go... Rush Limbaugh told his multi-millions of listeners that Obama only did that to gain favour with black people in A...
I worked for the Office of Management and Budget in the White House, on nuclear energy policy. But I decided it would be much more fun to have a specialty food store, so I left Washington D.C. and moved to the Hamptons. And how glad I am that I did!
In our world, 80 to 90 percent of women's weight gain comes from overindulging in insulin-stimulating food. And it's not hardcore, straight-up, I-can-see you-in-the-face sugar. They're eating whole-wheat bread. They're eating ancient grains. They're ...
It has never made any sense to argue that, unique among the people of the world, Arabs are more concerned on a day-to-day basis about the treatment of people they don't know than they are about how they're going to put food on their own tables, or wh...
Southeast Asia food uses many different types of spices which are quite new to me, like the curry leaves which I saw at the Kreta Ayer wet market in Chinatown. With such spices used in cooking, this usually imparts a strong aroma to Southeast Asian f...
To this day, the only argument against Obama that critics can seem to come up with involves admitting he's better than them - though they certainly season it with some racism. You know, he's that lucky black man who actually appeals to the populace. ...
If a situation requires sudden thought and action, the blood is promptly driven to the head. If a heavy meal is to be digested, the greater portion of the blood leaves the head, centering around the digestive organs. The Ego concentrates its efforts ...
I was trying to learn how to deal with the freedom that I had away from home for the first time. 'Long Black Train,' the song and the album, are very special to me. It was just one of those things that I felt like God gave to me for a purpose, and I'...
I do a lot of biking. I need that mileage and the long-distance stuff because tennis demands it. My fitness trainer is always trying to convince me to do an Ironman. I can probably run the marathon, I can make the 112 miles on the bike, but I will ne...
The greatest job I ever had was working on my family farm. Each morning my father would come into my bedroom around 4:30 am and command me to get up and work the fields. I would spend the next two hours before school slopping pigs and cropping tobacc...
When you're doing a film and the majority of the film is cast black, for me, it's most important to get people to view those movies as just movies, as just good movies. At the end of the day, regardless of the color of the cast, we're all doing the s...
There are never any absolutes in the fashion business: one day you may like black, and the next day you like colour. I think it's a good lesson that we should never believe too much in any one thing - because the next day it's out, and if we're stuck...
My aunt is the director of the acapella group Black Voices. I was so struck by them as a child. They sang with such passion and conviction. By the time I turned 15, I had plucked up the courage to ask if I could join the group. Acapella is a differen...
So when I got to be about 13 or 14, I started listening - even though my parents music was way cool - to contemporary hard rock at that time, which was Aerosmith, Cheap Trick, Black Sabbath, AC/DC, Ted Nugent and all that, and that's just where I cam...
The government does things like insisting that all encryption programs should have a back door. But surely no one is stupid enough to think the terrorists are going to use encryption systems with a back door. The terrorists will simply hire a program...
We don't walk. We overeat because we've made it easy to overeat. We have fast-food joints on every corner. By the way, the 'we' is all of us. It's not the government. It's all of us doing this together.
My cooking philosophy, what I try to do, is to make a cuisine where the produce and the product shines, compared to some current trends that are maybe more adding additional things, like molecular cuisine, with a lot of additives and chemicals, which...
