Message from Thomas Sayers Ellis. See you September 30th TOWARDS A MORE CIVIL UNION – JIM LEACH, CHAIRMAN OF THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES “In our society we rightly identify hate words with racial, ethnic, and gender slurs. What are we therefore to make of the usage or what more aptly might be described [...]
When DC artists come home for one of the city’s 3-H summers (hot, hazy and humid), you gotta jump on them and ask, “Why?” It’s like following Harriet Tubman south instead of north. That’s not the pattern for a DC born artist. “Go to New York, LA, Europe. Come back when you’ve made it, when [...]
“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” a film by John Hughes It’s pretty amazing how many people don’t finish the game in their 5th inning if you call life a game. This may sound like promotion for Ethelbert [...]
I see the moment we are witnessing as a civil rights movement rather than a push to topple the regime. If Rosa Parks was the American “mother of the civil rights movement,” the young woman who was killed point blank in the course of a demonstration, Neda Agha-Soltan, might very well emerge as its Iranian [...]
HEALTH CARE WATCH by the Numbers with Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com As I lamented yesterday, health care is one of those areas where both popular opinion and sound public policy seem to take a backseat to protecting those stakeholders who benefit from the status quo. Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight, the numbers cruncher whose stats predicted [...]
Note: This is my 200th post. Just thought I’d share that. HEALTH CARE REFORM ON THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION’S WATCH See where the Obama administration is going with health care reform; submit your stories; read the reports. The healthreform.gov site is user friendly. President Obama will appear in Green Bay, Wisconsin today to discuss health care [...]
My friend Abdul Ali has curated a new exhibit he’s been working on for about 2 years (if I remember). Trust me, when a poetry museum comes to Martin Luther King, Jr. Avenue, SE, take it as a sign of something magical in the wind. Abdul sent me this announcement: The American Poetry Museum will [...]
I teared up myself when I saw this story on “Today.” Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy U.S. Unemployment hits 8.5% This number doesn’t include the under-employed, i.e. part-time workers, or the folks who’ve just given up. The National Endowment for the Arts releases their report on Artist Unemployment [...]
Sunday February 1 will be Langston Hughes’s birthday. He would’ve been 107 years old. My how time flies. In The Big Sea, Langston articulated the real deal about Washington’s black bourgeoisie of the 1920s. The chapter is titled “Washington Society.” These upper class colored people consisted largely of government workers, professors and teachers, doctors, lawyers, [...]
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER The Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies has tapped poet, essayist, playwright, and teacher Elizabeth Alexander to deliver the inaugural poem January 20th. Alexander grew up in DC (Yay!). She teaches at Yale University and is a scholar of African American literature and culture. [Click on Alexander's name above to visit her website.] [...]
