Jamelle Bouie

Some coffee shop owners aren’t very happy about the droves of people who use their establishments mainly to do work and only occasionally drink coffee: Hers is one of a growing number of coffee bars that have opened recently around the country, particularly in New York. Instead of idling at a chair, customers at these […]

(source) Boston University’s Isabel Wilkerson has written a new book on the mass migration of African Americans from the South to industrial cities in the North and Midwest: Ms. Wilkerson makes a case that people who left the South only to create hometown-based communities in new places are more like refugees than migrants: more closely […]

If this new Gallup poll is any indication, liberals will soon be able to complain about Speaker John Boehner, and possibly Majority Leader Mitch McConnell: According to Gallup, this Republican lead is greater than any previous midterm advantage in Gallup’s 60-year history of tracking the generic ballot. Barring a miracle, Republicans are very likely to […]

It’s no secret that the “tech” world suffers from a dearth of women; overall, women account for a scant 6 percent of the chief executives of the top 100 tech companies. Only 22 percent of software engineers at tech companies are women, and among the venture capitalists who fund tech start-ups, only 14 percent are […]

When I was in high school, there wasn’t much to running for class office; you collected 50 signatures and then spent the following month convincing your classmates that you could actually do something about anything in the school. That said, it seems that other school districts have other requirements for entering the election; in Nettleton, […]

Seth Masket goes hard after Mark Halperin‘s latest ode to bipartisanship: I don’t know how these Beltway fantasies get started. No, you don’t need bipartisanship to get things done. This past Congress has seen almost no bipartisanship, and yet it’s probably been one of the most productive since LBJ was in the White House. Sure, […]

At NPR’s news blog, Frank James snarks on the DEA’s request for linguists who specialize in Ebonics: Some stories make you doublecheck the date just to make sure it’s not April Fools Day. Such is an Associated Press report that the Drug Enforcement Administration is seeking speakers of Ebonics who can do translation work for […]

Adam Serwer offers a brief defense of Uylsses S. Grant’s presidency: U.S. Grant was one of the most pro-civil-rights presidents we’ve ever had, and it’s largely because of the preeminence of Confederate lost cause dead-enders among Civil War historians intent on romanticizing the Confederate cause that his tenure as president is characterized as one of […]

I don’t have much to add to this, but it’s worth noting: In their paper, “Barriers to Health Care Among Asian Americans,” UB School of Social Work professors Wooksoo Kim and Robert H. Keefe write that Asian Americans cannot be carelessly lumped together with such easy stereotypes as “well adjusted” or “successful.” In addition to […]

I finally got around to reading The New York Times Magazine piece on the aimless 20-something, and as a somewhat aimless 20-something, it strikes me as a little blinkered. For starters, outside of a few nods to the recession, there isn’t much of an effort to understand why financial independence is so hard to find. […]