And why is there still a quarter-mile line zigzagging around the mall? A telephone? Right, right... GPS... music... really fast Internet. Sexy. But plans don't come with a great mortgage rate. They don’t come with free gas either. So maybe my homeboy Phil Gramm was on to something with his "mental recession" assessment.

Smooth. Clever. Measured. Black — well, half black — not quite as scary as all black. He’s different but similar, and all the groovy cats want to be down with him — John Hope Franklin, Jay-Z, ScarJo, The Kennedys, Oprah, Brad Pitt, even Abdul-Jabbar.

The thing I remember most vividly about beginning my internship at TransAfrica Forum, the foreign policy lobbyist group founded in 1977 to pressure the U.S. Government to do right by Africa and the African Diaspora, was that I didn't want to be there.

Morehouse College, the nation's only all-male historically black college, has selected a white student as its valedictorian for the first time. David Wall Rice, a graduate of Morehouse and now a psychology professor there, looks beyond the novelty.

It is pedestrian in scope, takes for granted the complexity of black people, our multiple political agendas and is oh-so-typical of mainstream, pop thinking — you know, that almost analysis that substitutes rich reporting and thought for simplicity and personality profiles that are supposed to be deep.