ArcaMax

And now here's this week's episode of Great Moments in Black History.

The year is 1979. Jimmy Carter is in office, disco is on the radio and Ron Stallworth has just joined the Ku Klux Klan.

We are indebted to the Deseret Morning News, of Salt Lake City, for revealing this in an article earlier ...Read more

Cities have multiple personalities. I am reminded of that with bracing clarity by what some Chicagoans are calling the "weekend from hell."

It was the weekend in which the mammoth Lollapalooza festival drew tens of thousands of music fans to make joyful noise in downtown Chicago while some of the city's lowest-income and highest-crime ...Read more

Racial eruptions have become so common in the news of the Trump era that they can exhaust one's capacity to remain perpetually outraged. Almost.

Yet, as a new twist on these tribally turbulent times, the case of Sarah Jeong deserves special attention -- and it has been receiving plenty.

Right-wing commentators erupted in high, full-blown ...Read more

"Reality is for people who can't handle drugs," according to an old hippie slogan from the '60s. Today I would update that line to say that reality is for people who can't handle conspiracy theories.

Back when Barack Obama was president, we saw the rise of "birthers," people who couldn't wrap their heads around the reality that the nation's ...Read more

President Donald Trump expressed a familiar beef in his recent travels: The "fake news" media won't cover his fake news.

"What you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening," he told a crowd estimated at 4,000 Tuesday at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Kansas City, Mo.

What people were seeing and reading was a mixed ...Read more

Shortly after the first automobile arrived in the small but grandly named village of Ohio City, Ohio, an old story goes, someone brought a second car to town -- which soon collided with the first.

This story, which I learned growing up in another Ohio town, provided such an excellent example of Murphy's Law -- "Anything that can go wrong will ...Read more

When Barack Obama's first major speech since his presidency decried today's "utter loss of shame among political leaders," did anyone not know whom he was talking about?

When this country's the first African-American president made that point Tuesday during the 2018 Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture in Johannesburg honoring the 100th anniversary of...Read more

Donald Trump's claim that immigration is negatively "changing the culture" of Europe may be his ugliest racial-ethnic dog whistle yet. But it points to a disturbing trend. He's cozying up not only to Russia's Vladimir Putin but with rising far-right, populist ethno-nationalism across Europe.

In a news conference with the United Kingdom's Prime ...Read more

With his friendly face and charming family, Judge Brett Kavanaugh appears to offer President Donald Trump the good looks right out of "central casting" that our first reality-show president said he was seeking in a nominee to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy.

But in a ...Read more

As if Facebook didn't give social network users enough to be frustrated about, a Texas newspaper has discovered another. The social network's algorithm apparently thinks the Declaration of Independence is hate speech.

As shocked as I was to hear about this story, I also felt oddly relieved by a ...Read more

Is #AbolishICE a movement or just a slogan?

Is it a path to the White House for aspiring Democratic presidential hopefuls?

Or is it just the latest way for battle-ready Democrats to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory?

Such are the questions facing Democratic congressional candidates and presidential hopefuls as the hashtag "#AbolishICE"...Read more

When news broke that a man with a shotgun had killed five employees in the Annapolis, Maryland, Capital Gazette newsroom, recent 24/7 media chatter about "civility" suddenly got real.

"I thought I was going to die," intern Anthony Messenger, said later on the "Today" show. A colleague used his phone to send a text pleading for help amid the ...Read more

Leaving their work at the office has become a bigger challenge for President Donald Trump's top officials.

Last Friday night, for example, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked to leave a Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia, before she and her family had finished their cheese plate appetizers -- because, she was ...Read more

As horrendous as the stories may sound of a system that has taken more than 2,300 migrant children from their parents under President Trump's "zero tolerance" immigration policy, it is even worse that nobody appears to know when -- or whether -- the children and their parents will be united again.

Ironically, a Republican administration was ...Read more

Let's be honest, as President Donald Trump likes to say -- even when he's not doing it.

The president is passing the buck when he claims that Democrats are to blame for his administration's policy of ripping children away from parents in migrant families apprehended at the border.

Cue up the motto that President Harry Truman famously displayed...Read more

Even critics of President Donald Trump, like me, breathed sighs of cautious relief after he managed to meet with leaders of the G-7 and North Korea without starting World War III.

Yet, in characteristic fashion, even that low bar was not enough for Trump. "(E)verybody can now feel much safer than the day I took office," and "There is no longer ...Read more

Imagine for a moment that you have received a very official looking letter. It turns out to be a notice from the U.S. Justice Department to let you know that -- Surprise! -- you are being searched.

Years of your telephone and email records have been seized without your knowledge all the way back to -- and including -- your college student days!...Read more

Well, what do you say when a couple of the world's most notorious, self-promoting products and exploiters of the reality TV world get together and do something undeniably nice?

Well, how about "Thank you"?

That's what I say to President Donald Trump and She-Who-Needs-No-Introduction Kim Kardashian.

As you've probably heard by now, the ...Read more

After Donald Trump delivered his big shock of 2016 by winning the presidential election, even President Barack Obama -- Mr. "Hope and Change" himself -- began to sound to associates like he was losing his optimism about America's future.

So says Benjamin J. Rhodes, a close advisor through both of Obama's terms, in his new memoir, "The World as ...Read more

On the political entertainment front, everyone seems to be on apology tour these days, but not with apologies for everybody.

President Donald Trump is miffed that Disney chief Bob Iger phoned Valerie Jarrett, former top aide to President Barack Obama. He reportedly wanted her to be the first to know that Disney-owned ABC is canceling its reboot...Read more