Growing up: Vince Staples and Miguel

Vince Staples – Summertime ’06 “I ain’t never ran from nothin’ but the police,” he boasts on “Norf Norf,” to the accompaniment of sonar bleeps that I swear I’ve heard on a Spring Heel Jack record. This 21-year-old occasional Odd Future mate has a high, strident voice, a vestige of a harrowing adolescence he wants

Rough justice

I’m one of the liberals who supported the death penalty into the early 2000’s. The state has a perfect right to take your life should it find you difficult of a capital crime, I thought. Then DNA became accepted, resulting in exonerations, apologies, and nothing when innocent suspects died. Then evidence that years in death

‘Go, sleep with my slave; perhaps I can build a family through her’

An avid reader of a coffee table children’s Bible my grandmother had bought me in third grade, I was aware of Solomon’s seven hundred wives, Lot’s daughters drunken date rape of their father, the priests of Baal’s throats getting sliced by the river for worshiping this graven image, and, most cruelly, Yahweh prohibiting beloved Moses

Fighting them by joining them: What Happened, Miss Simone?

When she finally appears onstage after seconds of enthusiastic audience applause, she has a glazed look, as if she had just awakened from a mummified state. The expression deepens. Does she know where she is? Does she know who she is? In closeup the head is as solid and massive as a marble statue’s. Teachers

Yeeeargghhhaaaahh

A few weeks after Ornette Coleman’s death, I wanted to honor him with a little known recording. Besides, it’s never a wrong time to praise Yoko Ono’s early seventies peak. Happy Sunday

Options available!

The column I’ve been waiting for. Rebecca Traister: But the other thing that’s so revolutionary about fighting for marriage to be about love and companionship – and not about a strictly gendered economic or social power construct – is that it acknowledges human connections that are also available to millions of people outside of marriage

Moving on

To the friends who’ve married in the extraordinary last couple of years, I congratulate your freedom to move to any state in the country; its government must acknowledge your marriage. I don’t march in parades or change Facebook photos because I’m a prig. A good friend yesterday lamented the subtext of Anthony Kennedy’s decision —

Madonna and the problem with ‘aging gracefully’

I liked Rebel Heart. I wish “Unapologetic Bitch” had been a #1 hit; it’s better than “Justify My Love,” but because her cultural moment looks as dowdy as baggy jeans no one will acknowledge it. Getting hits is hard for everyone, chart watchers will say. But because she’s the icon to whom pop stars still

Singles 6/26

After two straight weeks of marvels, I was due for a slough. Fetty Wap and Kevin Gates reveal that they’re mortal, Leona Lewis that Adele is still a sthing, and Jean-Michel Jarré that he’s alive in theory. Maybe this explains my affection for the only Weeknd single I’ve embraced, ready for Abel Tesfaye to break

The smell of defeat

What reaction looks like. Michael Poterma: I’m not saying merely that if Bork hadn’t been rejected, President Reagan wouldn’t have appointed Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote today’s opinion: I think that if Bork had been on the Court, that platform would have given him an outsized opportunity to influence America’s cultural and constitutional discussion –

The ‘cynically manufactured and meritless argument’ of the King v. Burwell plaintiffs

Reading John Roberts’ majority opinion on the bus this morning, I was struck by the glee with which he skewers Antonin Scalia for the associate justice’s willingness to ignore statutory intent for the sake of his politics. This is called cynicism. Linda Greenhouse caught it too: Who said that we “must do our best, bearing

John Roberts: he ain’t goin’ nowhere

With the Affordable Care Act ruling, a big one regarding disparate impact in Fair Housing Act cases, and a likely affirmation of a right to marry gay coming next week, Anthony Kennedy is gunning for most hated man in the conservative blogosphere. But don’t mistake the Chief’s intentions: But it is of a piece with