0 On “Table-seats” and Validations: An Open Letter to Kanye West:

Dear Yeezy, I have deeply appreciated your additions to the constantly evolving black sonic canon. Creating and re-imagining what rappers/Black Men/Sad Men/Queer Men can sound like. You reminded us of the screams and moans in the echoes of Black music in America. These accolades can be found in other parts of your discography however, believing Yeezus is their culmination . But we have problems: the grief-driven misogyny; the obsession with goods as signifiers of legitimacy, framing particular women as those goods; and for having a devastating fixation on some mythical seat at a glass table surrounded by gate-keepers of cultural social order....

0 What We're Reading Today (3-20-14)

What Paul Ryan and Obama Have in Common - The Nation Melissa Harris-Perry Is Stop-and-Frisk Worth It? - The Atlantic Daniel Bergner How LBJ Saved the Civil Rights Act - The Atlantic Michael O'Donnell What Applying to Charter Schools Showed Me About Inequality - The Atlantic Conor Williams America's Hip-Hop Foreign Policy - The Atlantic Hisham Aidi Reading to Have Read - The Atlantic Ian Bogost Don't Tell Ruth Ginsburg to Retire - The Atlantic Garrett Epps A Caretaker and a Killer: How Hunters Can Save the Wilderness - The Atlantic Tovar Cerulli Glenn Ford's First Days of Freedom After 30 Years on Death Row - The Atlantic Andrew Cohen You...

1 The Injustice of Grit: Being Twice as Good and Teach for America

Every region in Teach for America adopts its own motto that is meant to describe the region’s “Core Values”. For Houston, we have “Justice. Leadership. 100%.” While I have some issues with one of those values, I have greater issue with a value that seems to have covertly found unofficial membership with the rest: grit. Grit, as I have understood it, is a certain mental toughness – an aversion to quitting. Grit means that when the going gets tough, you get tougher, so to speak. YES Prep has adopted grit as a central cornerstone of its charter model and I have seen it arrive in the Teach for America Office with greater and greater frequency...

0 What We're Reading Today (3-5-14)

Inside "The Act of Killing's" Guerrilla Distribution Campaign in Indonesia - Mother Jones Asawin Suebsaeng My Years of Magical Thinking: Thoughts on the 1980s Showtimes Lakers - The Nation Dave Zirin The New York Metro's Economy Is Almost as Large as Australia's - The Atlantic Cities Richard Florida Just How Doomed Are Congressional Democrats? Pretty Doomed - The Atlantic Charlie Cook Politics and the African-American Human Language - The Atlantic Ta-Nehisi Coates This is What the New SAT Will Be Like - The Atlantic Julia Ryan What Does Obama's Budget Say About Education? - The Atlantic Clare McCann Keeping Brothers Close and Dreams Closer:...