Courtesy of Citypaper.com 20.October.2009

As Jay-Z brings the traveling road show known as Blueprint III to Baltimore's 1st Mariner Arena Oct. 27, he does so at a time when he is literally carrying both hip-hop and it's hostile kidnapper -- Rap Mu$ick, LLC -- on his back. Shawn Corey...

"My dad, Jimmy, was one of so many young men who went to Vietnam. He was drafted in 1965 and served four or five tours. When I was a kid I'd wake up at night and find my dad walking around the house, patrolling. I'd be on my way to...

"It is a question to bear in mind in our attempts to understand what distinguishes from the past the new fabric of fear that we all seem to wear at this moment."

Chapter One, "A Changing Mask Of Fear", The Climate of Fear: A Quest...

"If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America..."

President Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1968, when he learned
that CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite believed that
Vietnam was "unwinnable".

On Friday, 17 July 2009, we lost another chunk of America. Walter Leland Cronkite crossed the finish line of a most...

Prologue to Act II:

"...The black man should no longer be confronted by the dilemma, turn white or disappear...if society makes difficulties for him because of his color, if in his dreams I establish the expression of an unconscious desire to change color, my objective will not...

"...human beings are still human beings and not piano keys, which, though played upon with their own hands by the laws of nature themselves, are in danger of being played so much that outside the calendar it will be impossible to want anything."

Fyodor Dostoevsky,
Notes From Underground

Act...

On a cab ride to Harlem last May I thought I was having an authentic angel dust flashback as I passed 123rd and Lenox Avenue. Looking down the vista of renovated million dollar brownstones and condos, I remembered something Marshall McLuhan once said: "We look at the present through a...

Sandwiched between the 1999 Columbine massacre and 9/11/2001, America was getting its first taste of stateside terrorism. Though the frightening violence seems to have resurfaced with the Virgina Tech slaughter two years ago, the carnage at a retirement home in North Carolina last week, the mass murders at an immigrant-outreach...

Finding Obamica, Vol. 4