I drove out of Black Rock City at 11 p.m. last night, during a dazzling, dancing fireworks display that was the best I'd ever seen in my life. As I left this physical place, which is a manifestation of shared dreaming, I watched each burst of color, and a sustained...

"I feel very free to reinvent myself."

These words are written in Magic Marker on one of those huge Post-It notes the size of a signboard. It hangs in my bedroom and has sustained me for some time as I've examined my life, made some changes, and stared down an...

One of my favorite routines from George Carlin is about people wanting to save the planet. He said, It's not about saving the planet. "The planet is fine. The people are f***ed... The planet isn't going anywhere. We are."

I feel the same way about public media. Once again,...

"juan, gettin ugly. wonder if it will result in him severing ties, or mutual"

That was my note at the top of an email I sent back in September of 2007 to a colleague at NPR. In full disclosure, I am a former employee of NPR, let go in 2008...

It's open season on black womanhood. Nightline became the latest media outlet to tackle the issue of why black women aren't married. The problem is not the topic, but the approach. Like a recent series of articles, books, and television segments (and one Nightline did last year), the show's focus...

To steal a line from Gloria Steinem, the truth about journalism will set you free. But first it will piss you off.

Earlier this week, the American Society of Newspaper Editors held its annual meeting in Washington, DC. On Sunday, the first day of the conference, ASNE...

Many of us describe ourselves as our jobs. We don't say "I work as a baker," but instead "I am a baker." Or "I am an accountant/engineer/police officer/cook." There is a lot...

"For every factual attack, there are a thousand possibilities...and all of them strike down together."

It's a line from China Mieville's speculative fiction novel The Scar, but it could easily describe today's politics.

President Obama has been described as a socialist and tool of banks and...

Right before the New Year, I got an email from Dan Streible, a cinema studies professor at New York University. "Yay," it began. "The Librarian of Congress placed Helen's film on the list."

The list, in this case, was the Library of Congress' 2009 list of films to be preserved,...

The singer John Mayer, @johncmayer on Twitter, put this 3-tweet post on his feed:

Re: using the 'N word' in an interview: I am sorry that I used the word. And it's such a shame that I did because the point I was trying/ to make was in the exact...

How did Massachusetts unaffiliated and independents vote in the Massachusetts Senate race? Being as there are reportedly no exit polls for the race Republican Scott Brown won, we may never know.

Some numbers.

A majority of Massachusetts voters (fifty-one percent) are unaffiliated. Among voters stating...

An op-ed in today's New York Times begins by saying:

Those who know a little of Haiti's history might have watched the news last night and thought, as I did for a moment: "An earthquake? What next? Poor Haiti is cursed."

The author, Tracy Kidder is a well-respected...

President Obama recently chided the press for putting substantive issues on the back burner. "I mentioned that I was in Asia on this trip thinking about the economy, when I sat down for a round of interviews. Not one of them asked me about Asia," he said. "It's an indication...

A year ago today, I was in NPR's Los Angeles studios, providing commentary for the network's election night special. I'd worked a double shift, first as the host of the African-American focused show News and Notes, then rolling on into the coverage of returns and looks at ballot initiatives like...

When I woke up this morning to find out that President Obama had won the Nobel prize, based on diplomacy and anti-nuclear proliferation work, I immediately sent notice to my circle of friends, and then went onto the social media space to see what the other instapundits were saying.

One...

Uber-media critic Howard Kurtz has gotten it coming and going in the past month. First, CNN got lambasted for mis-covering the Iran election and protests. In an age where Twitter is fetishized, a hashtag (or searchable ID) called #CNNFail became all the rage.

This article on MediaBistro links to...

I recently released Kiss the Sky, a novel about a black rock musician. Then I did an event with an actual black rock musician who read my book and said that the part about Michael Jackson was so eerie. I had forgotten all about it. But I found it......