1. Buy five whole orders of the surprisingly filling Vietnamese Shrimp Summer Rolls at The Cheesecake Factory.

If there’s one movie I’ve seen a possible, actual, literal 1,000-plus times in life, it’s The Sound of Music. If you grew up overseas on military bases in the 1980s, movies were your viewing pleasure. The Department of Defense provided us with one channel, the Armed Forces Network (or AFN, for short), and decided what…

I have a theory that because of the way we curate our social media circles nowadays, I believe most of us think our circles are representative of reality. This is my story, this is my song. I also think it’s pure bullshit.

I was driving my daughter to school this morning, gleefully coasting across the Washington, D.C., area’s Woodrow Wilson Bridge, named after possibly the most racist president of all time, a true accomplishment considering that several presidents actually owned slaves, when my phone buzzed. Like many folks, I get an…

Look at this shiftless and triflin’ fuck. Sitting in the front row of a funeral, with the world’s attention on him—hundreds of millions of eyes, perhaps—and he looks like a 6th grader whose parents dragged him to Les Miserables on ice. He’s the leader of the free world (shit), and he couldn’t even bother to sit up…

2010 was a transitional year for me. A three-year relationship ended in the early part of the year, we had to move out of the house we lived in and go our separate ways, and I had to figure out a new life as a single man but one with a child. Life was different in the most substantial way, to that point, that it…

Although the people who’ve come to be known as hoteps get a bad rap today, I have a measure of sympathy for them because I went through a moderate hotep phase in college — something I know many 35-to-45 year old black people can definitely relate to. Basically, being a hotep is like smoking weed. Most have tried it at…

To call the Wu-Tang Clan one of the most influential musical acts of all-time isn’t hyperbole. When they burst onto the scene in 1993 as a gritty and grimey Staten Island, N.Y., counterpoint to the Dr. Dre-helmed polish of Los Angeles G-funk, music shifted, too. In the decades since, the Wu footprint has shown up in…

Did you know that houses owned by black Americans are undervalued by an average of $48,000 per home? Combined, this makes for 156 billion dollars in losses—a discrepancy called a “segregation tax.” I didn’t know this either, until a recent study by the Brookings Institute articulated exactly how pervasive this brand…

In the summer of 1990, each day the weather and his schedule permitted, my dad and I would leave our rowhouse on Mellon Street and walk four blocks up Hays Street to the basketball courts lurking behind what was then Peabody High School. Once there, we’d park at one of the “good” hoops — either the hoop closest to the…

Meek Mill’s latest album, Championships, dropped today. While I’m not the biggest fan of the Philadelphia yellsmith, I can acknowledge that because of everything that’s transpired in the past, say 18 months of his life, this album release is an event. From a very public feud with Drake (they’re cool now; Drake’s even…

50. Gravity.

There’s nothing like a good ole Facebook Memory, eh? This morning, while logging into the ‘Book, I was reminded of a discussion I started on November 29, 2017 (a year ago), spurred by an episode of This Is US about which historically black college or university (HBCU) was the most well-known. Here’s an excerpt…

As a parent, the education of my children is a huge part of my life. I’m not only concerned by what that education looks like; I am equally concerned about who is providing it. I have two children in school—age 9 (4th grade) and 3 (Pre-Kindergarten)—at two entirely different schools in two entirely different places.…

The writing of blurbs—the succinct quotes of praise from an author’s peers that exist on a book’s front and back covers—has become a “nuclear arms race” that can drain blurb writers of their most valuable asset (time), writes Marie Myung-Ok Lee yesterday in an extensive feature on this quirk of the publishing industry…

“Oh,” I’d say, occasionally and irritatingly, to the people who’d lament the approaching cold, “but what about the sweaters?”

Since the release of the trailer for the new The Lion King live-action (or CGI or animated, whatever tickles your fancy and allows you fall back from your personal “well, actually’”face-ass principles) film remake—set to drop in July 2019 - the jokes about H-town’s finest, Beyoncé “Sorry, I’m Not Sorry” Knowles’…

It started with a pre-Thanksgiving conversation about how sensitive we (black men) are with our hair, a discussion sparked by a homie’s lament that he needs to find a new barber because his current one is moving out of state soon. And then one of us claimed, “In my lifetime, I’ve probably had more girlfriends than…

It is officially official: the live-action version of The Lion King, with all of your faves, will hit theaters in July 2019 so we can all excitedly watch Mufasa die. Again. Twenty-five years after he died the first time.

Many years ago I remember getting into an argument with a friend about the documentary, Waiting for Superman, the 2010 documentary that looks at the American public school system. The argument wasn’t about the specifics of the film at all. The argument was about how well-known the documentary was. I argued that…