Weekly Address: President Obama on Judge Sotomayor’s Experience from White House on Vimeo.
The President discusses the breadth and depth of experience held by his nominee for the Supreme Court. In the course of a life that began in a housing project in the South Bronx and brought her to the pinnacle of her [...]
Today is the beginning of summer for me. I’m wrapping up contracts and starting to look at the summer calendars for a few weeks of catchup around town. Though airfares are great, and there are plenty vacation deals out there, there’s a certain challenge to finding something new and interesting just outside your [...]
President Barack Obama has picked Bronx born, U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Sonia Sotomayor as his nominee to replace David Souter on the U.S. Supreme Court. The question - are opponents of the nominee willing to put their political chips on the table and block this historic nomination? Apparently, Sotomayor is willing to [...]
Last week, at the end of our Q&A for the Community Cinema screening of ASK NOT (a documentary by Johnny Symons that explores the effects of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) policy from 1993 to the present), I asked all the people in the room who’ve served in the U.S. military to stand so [...]
Yesterday, I had a two hour lunch meeting with Bomani Armah, aka “D’Mite.” He’s also known as the “Mr. Read a Book,” a crunk music video that made him nortorious on CNN and with the lit’rate set. We covered a lot of territory about books, music, role models, freelancing, parenting, culture, creativity, and media. [...]
Back in the 70s hey day D.C.’s McKinley High School was the school the musician types went to. McKinley had music lessons and a decent marching band. The theater and dance folks enrolled in an after-school program called Workshops for Careers in the Arts. They met in the student union at GWU, [...]
Anna Wintour’s 60 Minutes interview - I guess the most revealing moment of this one-on-one with the 59-year-old editor of American Vogue is that she removed her signature shades to talk with Morley Safer. I see Wintour’s “decisiveness” as her strength in the fashion industry; others may hate her for it. But there [...]
To talk or not to talk. That is the question. President Obama’s efforts to bring friends and foes together for a little table talk to address pressing issues is in his words a switch from the old-style Washington politics of the past.
However, it remains to be seen if table talk will [...]
When Andy Shallal told me he was opening a restaurant inspired by Zora Neale Hurston, I was more curious as to how a companion to Busboys and Poets (named after Zora’s old poet pal Langston Hughes) would size up. Would there be a stage for folk stories? A wall of hat racks? [...]
“In all seriousness, I come here not to dispute the suggestion that I haven’t yet achieved enough in my life. I come here to embrace it; to heartily concur; to affirm that one’s title, even a title like president, says very little about how well one’s life has been led — and that no matter [...]
