Mindy Kaling is a boss. Widely regarded by her coworkers and by critics alike as the best writer for the popular sitcom The Office, since September she’s been staring in, writing, producing and directing her own primetime TV show, The Mindy Project, which just wrapped up its first season and has been picked up for a second. The Mindy Project is the first TV sitcom staring an Indian-American: definitely an historic achievement. Importantly, just a few days into the start of the season, trolls, in the form of TV-critics-who-write-under-cover-of-internet, lost their collective minds and began harping on Mindy Kaling’s smug and self-satisfied nature. …Read more »

ONE One would grow weary of the list of foods I generally refuse ingesting: I don’t eat beef or pork, peas or boiled peanuts, and, of course, a lot of things in between. Something about being able to decide what one wants on one’s tongue, what flavors one decides to savor, is something I hold in high esteem. And the food we desire is just as much about placement into worlds as it is about feelings of and needs for satiation. There’s this chocolate I had in the back of my parents’ Oldsmobile years and years ago that I loved …Read more »

When I was working on my Ph.D., I swore that I would not be one of those people who tripped every time someone didn’t greet them with the proper title… As a first generation college student I was not aware, during my undergraduate years, that most of my professors had a Ph.D. (or even what a Ph.D. was, or what that meant) so it was off-putting when I would be chastised for not saying Dr. ____.  At the time, when I referred to a professor as Ms. or Mr. instead of Dr., it was not because I was trying to …Read more »

  After this latest week of utter shamtastery in Hip Hop, the words of the late great Aaliyah resonate now more than ever: We need a resolution; there is so much confusion. Rick Ross thinks that drugging a woman and raping her isn’t rape, but rather a case of misunderstanding. FOH Talib Kweli thinks that the first responsibility that women in Hip Hop have to men in Hip Hop is to love to them. Despite his alleged support for Frank Ocean, Busta Rhymes remains an unrepentant and violent homophobe. From my armchair therapist’s seat, I want to ask what Busta …Read more »

Guest Post by Regina N. Bradley at Red Clay Scholar     While listening to Beyonce’s latest single “Bow Down/I Been On” an eyebrow raised in amusement along with a low “woooooord?” I couldn’t believe that Beyonce, Mrs. “Girls-Run-the-World” was talking to bitches and – gasp! – demanding they bow down. But it wasn’t Bey’s emphatic singing and ad libs that caught my attention. It was the track itself. The track, in all its “H-town vicious” glory, that briefly pulled Beyonce back south off her global stage. I contextualize Beyonce as a dichotomy of grit and grace, two polarized representations of …Read more »