Body piercing and baggy clothes express identity among black youth, and not just beginning with hip-hop culture. Moreover, young black entrepreneurs like Sean 'P. Diddy' Combs and Russell Simmons have made millions from their clothing lines.
There are huge divorces and divides and chasms in black America between the have-gots and the have-nots, between the monied and the poor, between the educated and the non-educated. And there are huge and growing chasms daily. And I want to say that i...
Conservatism is, among many other things, a culture. The most important glue binding it together is a shared sense of cultural grievance - the conviction, uniting conservatives high and low, theocratic and plutocratic, neocon and paleocon, that someo...
Richard M. Nixon honestly believed in his bones that an organized conspiracy of liberal media insiders had literally been plotting against him ever since he broke Alger Hiss in 1948 (he never shifted course, and lost his soul).
Chicago's privatization mania began during Mayor Richard M. Daley's administration, which ran from 1989 to 2011. Under his successor, Rahm Emanuel, the trend has continued apace. For Rahm's investment banker buddies, the trend has been a boon. For ci...
Sociologists in the 1960s, reaching for an explanation of why cities were burning, often spoke of the problem of 'rising expectations.' It wasn't that the times were especially miserable for blacks, or even that the neighborhoods that rioted were the...
As an adult, I've always found the stereotype that Jews are liberal a curious one; my parents' circle was predominantly conservative, not just on Israel but on most political issues. Most of all, they were intensely (and this is a word I remember rep...
It's almost a very rough rule of thumb: when Democrats are able to successfully frame the meaning of an election season around middle-class fears, Democrats win the election; when Republicans are able to successfully frame the meaning of an election ...
The reactionary percentage of the electorate in these United States has been relatively constant since McCarthy's day; I'd estimate it as hovering around 30 percent. A minority, but one never all that enamored of the niceties of democracy - they see ...
The fact is that the Democratic Party in modern times has always had a conservative wing, one frequently as strong or stronger than its liberal wing, and as such, when progressives speak of the party as a vehicle that naturally belongs to them, as if...
There's a lot of surplus rage from the '60s that was never really worked through publicly. I think a lot of that rage still exists, and I think you see that when John McCain runs a commercial that beats up on Hillary Clinton's earmark for a Woodstock...
I was a boy with one dream and one dream only: I wanted - no, strike that, I was desperate for - a room of my own. You see, in those days I shared a room with my little brother, Jesse, and it wasn't pretty. He was the Oscar to my Felix: messy, carele...
Growing up in Britain as a rather loose Jew, the two things that didn't belong together were freedom and religious intensity. In America, they do. The Founding Fathers made a bet that if you didn't force everyone to profess religion in their own part...
That's why I like to get out there, and get people to see the other side of Mitt, and know us in a different reflection when you see the family and how funny he is with the boys and with the grandkids. And you know, just what a super guy he is. That'...
I like girls who want to get up and dance and don't mind singing in front of my family - you know, silly stuff. Some girls won't eat in front of boys or won't go bowling. They just want to go out and look pretty. I don't really get that. I want someo...
In 'Bras & Broomsticks,' Rachel Weinstein gets the shock of her life when she discovers that her mom and her younger sister, Miri, are both... witches! In 'Frogs & French Kisses,' Rachel and her witchy family are back - Miri is busy zapping up ways t...
I first fell in love with music when I was a little boy. When I first heard music, I felt the beauty in it. Then, being able to tap along on a table top and box was great, but my favorite thing to do was to watch records spin. I would almost get hypn...
One time at the University of Colorado, at a faculty dinner, this professor said to me, 'Well, my goodness, a boy from Appa-lay-chee-a with a Ph.D!' The dinner was in her house. And I said, 'My grandparents didn't have indoor plumbing, but they had m...
To tell you the truth, when I came along in this business and thinking about being an actress, I had no idea things would get so graphic and nudey-orientated. I knew you had to have the physical appeal of a woman was always important thing in movies....
At 9 years old, I moved in with my father because my mother could no longer care for me. Looking back, I now see so many similarities between my own childhood and that of my sons. My father stepped in when I needed him, and that gave me the chance fo...
New Orleans invented the brown paper bag party - usually at a gathering in a home - where anyone darker than the bag attached to the door was denied entrance. The brown bag criterion survives as a metaphor for how the black cultural elite quite liter...
