I was talking to a coworker earlier today about the arrest of Julian Assange and the response to WikiLeaks in general, and she pointed me towards some more good reading on the matter, including Glenn Greenwald and a piece tying WikiLeaks backs towards Valerie Plame and Wen Ho Lee.  Although these pieces are not directlyRead moreRead more

Louis C.K. (via Ta-Nehisi Coates) schools Leno on race relations.  Coates brings up an important point in his discussion: as easy as it is to look around in 2010 and feel satisfied with racial progress (not a wise attitude to take, but an easy one), it’s worth remembering that it really was not very longRead moreRead more

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I love cities.  I love the city in which I live, and I especially love that I can now walk to work — my office is downtown in a major metropolis but I have a beautiful and relaxed commute, on a walking path along a lake. Read moreRead more

Jay-Z gives an excellent interview over at NPR.  The excerpt from his book is also worth reading; I don’t generally go in for memoirs (except of Cuban childhoods — trying to decode my mother’s foreign youth and all that), but this one seems promising (and not entirely ghostwritten).  His take on what it is toRead moreRead more

“Glee” is kind of a big deal right now.  They’re getting gushing write-ups in Rolling Stone, episodes of “The Office” devoted to them, and, oh yeah, outselling the Beatles.  The “Glee” Christmas album is predicted to be this season’s biggest hit.  There’s no show I find so simultaneously entertaining and enraging as this High SchoolRead moreRead more

I’ve been preoccupied with moving and have just now gotten caught up with the world of the blogosphere.  Turns out there’s even more good stuff out there than I posted earlier.  To wit: Sociologist Victor Rios offers insight into the structures which serve to alienate inner-city youth from society.  It’s a brief interview but offersRead moreRead more

I live and work in Oakland, California.  On Friday, I walked out of the office building where I work downtown — through a side door, because the main doors had already been boarded up — into a knot of police officers, patrolling the streets in riot gear.  Their uniforms said they were from Monterey County,Read moreRead more

One meme that seems to have made its way into the various national election post-mortems is that California escaped the Democratic bloodbath; that, in spite of the failure of Prop 19, we remain so staunchly liberal that we are replacing the Governator with Governor Moonbeam.   Really, though, what analysts forget is that the CaliforniaRead moreRead more

Yesterday’s elections are big news, certainly, but hardly the only news in town — here are some other good pieces that might have been missed: This is a nice reminder that many government employees are, in fact, competent and devoted public servants, while this is an excellent takedown of the right-wing idea that the properRead moreRead more

With the midterm elections fast approaching, the time is ripe for reflections on the changes wrought in the political landscape since Obama’s election nearly two years ago.  Such thinkpieces tend more towards the negative — though some are more balanced than others — but, invariably, much mention is made of ye olde Tea Party, thatRead moreRead more