Like every other black filmmaker and/or self-appointed guardian of black cultural treasures, I was as worried as I was delighted when I heard Quentin Tarantino's next film would be a slave-narrative-cum-spaghetti-western. He's easily one of the most exciting filmmakers in the history of cinema, and much of that excitement comes...

Like every other American left terrified by the previous debate -- having stared into the abyss of the likelihood of a Romney presidency -- last night I cheered the TV as the president battled back against a privileged, spoiled bully. Last night Obama did most everything he needed to do...

You know it's 2012 when Chris Rock and Julie Delpy star in a romantic comedy. 2 Days in New York is not only the funniest but the most contemporary and authentic romantic comedy to come out in years. It's not mumbly and twee like so many twenty-something indie relationship pics,...

The malaise is palpable, from both sides. Mitt Romney is clearly a consolation prize to every single member of the GOP except twenty or so CEOs, while for many on the other side the almost impossible magic of electing a young, charismatic black man as leader of the free world...

I've just finished a new play called, Kansas City Swing, that takes place in 1947, the year Jackie Robinson entered Major League Baseball. My play, however, is about that other great black superstar, Satchel Paige, and his long-standing rivalry with Bob Feller, two of the very best pitchers in the...

Either Romney doesn't understand the words coming out of his mouth, he's just pretending not to understand the words coming out of his mouth, or he's the worst businessman ever. It's hard to believe it's the latter. You'd think someone whose entire wealth, his $22 million a year, $60,000 a...

It's still hard for me to believe that we're already a dozen years into the twenty-first millennium. I mean, just look around. We've got Romney and Santorum trying to pull us back into the 1950s while Gingrich dreams of a grand return to the 1850s. If it weren't for a...

Oh this is gonna be great, gonna be great, great, great. Or as my noble forefathers on the Emerald Isle used to say before hitting the open road, "May the cat eat you and the devil eat the cat." The boys and the Mistress are excited as well. Master is...

"So, as far as I can tell, judging from the psychological data, we have only one real risk to America from his marital history if Newt Gingrich were to become president: We would need to worry that another nation, perhaps a little younger than ours, would be so taken by...

With George Lucas's admirable media blitz for Red Tails I'm asked a lot these days my thoughts on this new telling of their awe-inspiring true story. See, I'm kind of obsessed. Not only did I help bring their story to HBO in 1995 as The Tuskegee Airmen, but...

I've been back East for the last six years, Manhattan for five, then last fall missed the water so much I moved to the beaches of Westport, Connecticut. It's beautiful here but the Long Island Sound ain't no Pacific.

The Kansas speech and his 60 Minutes interview should begin to thaw if not reignite the once white-hot enthusiasm Obama's base has had for him. If he continues to stay on message, forcefully addressing income inequality and positioning himself as the champion of the...

The upcoming Obama/Romney title bout might very well go down as the least enthusiastic in years. The right will hold their noses and vote R while the left will hold their noses and vote D, each side angry, scared, frustrated and unenthused. We're on track for an agonizing squeaker, a...

Of Obama's winning coalition, first progressives and independents, then rank and file Democrats started souring on the president, seeing his cabinet, his economic policy choices too closely aligned with those of Wall Street. All the GOP had to do was lay low, just keep restating that they were against an...

Professor Derrick Bell, who died on Oct. 6, was a hero of mine even before I was lucky enough to adapt his unforgettable story "Space Traders" (pdf) for HBO, starring Robert Guillaume and directed by Reginald Hudlin. It was part of a three-part 1994 series entitled...

I'm doing great. After living through over ten years of deteriorating kidney function, Dan, one of my best friends since the fifth grade, coughed up one of his own and then a brilliant and nimble team of doctors and nurses headed up by Dr. Ben Samstein at Columbia Presbyterian tucked...

With the publication of Toure's Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness, I have been inundated with requests for my 1989 essay, "The New Black Aesthetic," to which Toure's enjoyable work is a book-length update and homage.

The essay began as a term paper in an African-American survey course my junior year...

We're pretty much the same age, similarly overeducated and both raised in predominantly white neighborhoods (but I'd trade Oahu for Hamden, Connecticut, any day of the week). We're both recovering nerds and his meteoric rise was like rocket fuel to my own love life when I was...

Look, I'm a proud political junkie but this debt ceiling nonsense is, as they might say on the street, some bad shit. Listen to it too long and it'll kill ya. The debate itself has pulled our nation so far from where I had hoped it might be heading two...

I don't mean the middle of the road, whatever that might be, in an American 21st century where virtually every single national GOP candidate claims to believe neither in evolutionary nor environmental settled science.

No, what I mean is that progressives tend to spend a lot of time worrying...