Sara Imjan covers music, literature, and lowbrow pop culture for Turnstyle. She's a writer of snappy emails, and a cynic who adores her mom. In her spare time, she reads other writers' Style section stories.
The love with which Viola Davis is embraced by black audiences is perhaps only rivaled by the scathing reception to her new movie “The Help” by many of those same black movie-goers. Of course, this opprobrium is happening in the more progressive quarters of the black blogosphere, but now there’s an even but searing critique making the rounds on the web from a more unassailable source: historians.
I suppose it was inevitable; a Quranic tweetfest for Ramadan.
Musician Erykah Badu just added a term to the glossary of neo-soul culture: Badoula.
Time Magazine’s Mark Halperin has been indefinitely suspended as an MSNBC commentator for calling President Obama a “dick” on air.
A video circulating on the internet today shows New York police beating someone, apparently a woman, who had apparently been attending a Smif n Wessun concert in Brooklyn.
The International Weightlifting Federation has changed its dress code policy to allow Islamic attire.
As part of a federal civil rights lawsuit, the mother of Oscar Grant will receive $1.3 million dollars in a settlement from Bay Area Rapid Transit for the killing of her 22-year-old son at the hands of a BART cop.
Over at Poynter.org, Steve Myers takes up the question of whether the most shared story of the week is damaging to the sharer’s profession. Namely, whether the public can trust a journalist who’s spent his adult career lying to his employers:
We suppose it’s possible that you haven’t yet seen all the buzz around this morning’s New York Times article by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas admitting that he is undocumented. Soapbox: the video is no substitute for spectacular longform print journalism, so do read it when you get a chance. However, if your work doesn’t allow you the time to read a 4,000 word piece in the middle of the day, you can get the condensed version of his story in the video below, produced by Define American, which Vargas founded to expand the conversation on immigration policy.
As politicians gear up for the 2012 elections, it’s a bit early to see attack ads (they’re relegating all the salvos to debates at this point) but one California Democrat currently running in a special election got hit with a reprehensible ad this month.
