The most dangerous place for black people to live is in white people’s imagination. So says comedian D.L. Hughley. And surely Tamir Rice and Trayvon Martin would concur if they were alive to do so. But if white people’s imagination is the most dangerous place for black people, it is also the most denigrating. Fresh […]

It’s a new literary genre — books by former staff members and aides who now want to dish about the awfulness of Donald Trump or his White House. Last month, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie debuted the latest book in that field, “Let Me Finish: Trump, the Kushners, Bannon, New Jersey and the Power […]

Next time, they should redistribute the pain. That’s an expression Martin Luther King used — he credited Jesse Jackson — in the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers strike as he urged boycotts and other forms of economic coercion in support of the strikers. Those men had been suffering alone, he said. Now, let the whole town […]

Greetings from Albuquerque. As these words are written, it is Thursday morning and I am in New Mexico to promote my new novel, “The Last Thing You Surrender.” I have to be back home before Monday to teach a class. If my return flight were canceled because, say, the TSA went on strike, I’d be […]

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. We’ll have to make do with 600 or so. The picture in question — the video, actually — electrified social media over the weekend. In it, a white high school boy wearing a “Make America Great Again” cap, confronts an older Native American man who is […]

Our topic for today: three stories and a letter. The stories all made recent headlines. The first was about the state of Florida posthumously pardoning the Groveland Four, a group of African-American men who suffered torture, prison and murder after being falsely accused of raping a white woman in 1949. The second concerns broad Republican […]

Haven’t we seen this movie before? Certainly, there is a sense of deja vu all over again as one watches the right wing hyperventilate over a certain freshman congresswoman from New York. The attacks on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been frequent and furious, but also petty, silly and (in the mental-health sense) hysterical. Just days ago, […]

As a general rule, I don’t curse a lot. I’ve found that I can usually express myself effectively enough without it. And it’s always seemed to me that foul language, used ubiquitously, loses its primary value, i.e., its ability to shock or to state a thing with force. How seriously should anyone take the F-bomb […]

On the last night of the Republican National Convention in 1988, the candidate sought to impart to the country a vision of the America it could be. “Some,” he said, “would say it’s soft and insufficiently tough to care” about troubled children. “But where is it written, that we must act as if we do […]