A couple of recent articles tackle the question of race in America from two ends of the cultural spectrum. Mark de la Vina of the Mercury News discusses how comedians are some of the few people who are actually talking about Barack Obama’s race. Paul Mooney, a very funny, veteran African American comedian, says Obama present a [...]

Seriously, BagNewsNotes has been doing such a good job analyzing images of Obama and images of Obama and McCain — we could use use his wisdom here.

The following is a personal reflection on the meaning of George Carlin by David Masciotra, published in the “impressions” section of PopPolitics magazine: How does one make a 14-year-old who hates high school excited about language, learning and politics? One way guaranteed to be effective is to make the entire process painfully funny. At one point I [...]

I posted last week about on the power of rumors in this year’s presidential campaign — about how this old-fashioned tactic has taken on new meaning in the digital age. Two subsequent articles have done a great job of explaining the reasons why and how rumors work. In a New York Times op-ed, Sam Wang [...]

Every summer, it seems, I go through my Liz-Phair-regret phase. It’s probably because on our near-annual roadtrips, Liz Phair’s first three albums — “Exile in Guyville,” “Whip-Smart” and “whitechocolatespaceegg” — are still, to this day, in heavy rotation in the car’s CD player. Besides being full of fun, quirky and complex music, they are powerful [...]

Greg Braxton writes in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times: There’s a somewhat surprising consensus that admirable black fictional figures may have subtly conditioned the electorate to be receptive to a candidate like Obama, the presumptive Democratic standard-bearer. “One wonders to what degree a scenario played out in a safe, contained, fictionalized context might have prepared people for the [...]

This election year, instead of dreaded “swiftboating,” the chief Republican campaign tactic is rather old-fashioned: rumors. Granted, rumors take on a whole new meaning in the digital age, but they work by the same word-of-mouth method they always have. I was heartened by the fact that the Obama campaign saw this new/old reality and decided [...]

The coverage — truly, the celebration — of Tim Russert’s life and legacy has been, surprisingly, very engaging. Sure, I got a bit tired of the non-stop eulogizing, but the affection and dignity with which everyone has remembered Russert feels like a oasis of humanity amidst the manufactured narratives that dominate TV news. In particular, [...]

The following is a new article by Steve Schwartz, published in the “sights” section of PopPolitics magazine. Schwartz reviews and contextualizes the “John Adams” miniseries, which has just been released on DVD: In one of the final scenes of HBO’s seven-part miniseries “John Adams” (available now on DVD), the former president, nearing 80 years old and [...]

Watching Michelle Obama on “The View” (watch it yourself while it lasts), you see all her very admirable strengths — and you see a predictable campaign strategy emerging. As Jodi Kantor and Michael Powell over at The Caucus put it: The virtue of a show like this is clear — not only is there [...]