Saturday, December 21

Tag: others

Oprah Winfrey, others pay tribute to late author Toni Morrison
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Journalism

Oprah Winfrey, others pay tribute to late author Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison, a Nobel Prize-winning US writer known for her work on race, died in August, aged 88. In offering tribute to Toni Morrison, speakers from Oprah Winfrey to Fran Lebowitz have each shared a very different, but equally special portrait of the late Nobel laureate, who died in August at the age of 88. Angela Davis remembered a dear friend who as a Random House editor helped launch her writing career and would jot down notes for what became the classic Song of Solomon as she cooked eggs for her family. Lebowitz marvelled at Morrison's seemingly photographic memory of the bad reviews she had received. Poet Kevin Young once went to the cinema with her and otherwise proudly sat at her feet. Winfrey spoke of Morrison's majestic, sometimes intimidating pres...
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Journalism

How This Black Entrepreneur Went From Homelessness to Housing Others

With help from a business incubator, Tyrone Poole created a platform to help people on low incomes find housing. Collapse and regeneration are experiences Tyrone Poole knows intimately. There was that period back in 2006 when he was homeless—that moment when, on crutches and in excruciating pain, Poole found himself staggering into the bus station in Portland, Oregon, where he collapsed on a bench and threw up. That was how a policeman found him that night and later took him to the YMCA homeless shelter, where he got a cot on the gym floor. Everything he owned was in a bag under the bed. What had led to Poole’s downslide was medical debt. He’d completed his associate degree at Portland Community College and was training to be a firefighter when he suffered a debilitating i...
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SOCIAL JUSTICE

Oscar Grant Was Shot by Police 10 Years Ago. Now His Family Is Helping Others to Heal

His life was cut short on a train platform. Now his family is building bridges between police and the community, and connecting families affected by such violence. Oscar Grant III was an unarmed Black man killed by a police officer in Oakland, Calif., years before Black Lives Matter drew national attention to the growing number of unarmed Black men, women and children who die at the hands of law enforcement officers—what some scholars are calling an epidemic. Jan. 1 marked 10 years since the 22-year-old father was fatally shot by the Bay Area Regional Transit officer in the early morning hours of New Year’s Day. In the decade since his tragic death, Grant’s family has helped to create a police citizen review board of BART, established a foundation, and launched a campaign...
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Women-led podcasts take a risk others won’t: admitting they don’t know everything
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SOCIAL JUSTICE

Women-led podcasts take a risk others won’t: admitting they don’t know everything

In the podcasting world, as in so much of life, men get to do most of the talking. As of this writing, just 18 of iTunes’s top 100 podcasts are hosted by women. Twelve have female co-hosts. And 70 are hosted by one or more men.But despite this imbalance, podcasting has the potential to democratize the legacy broadcasting industry. Already, women-hosted shows are elevating marginalized voices and tackling intimate issues that we rarely discuss in our public lives. I believe that podcasts’ ability to engage people in difficult conversations may well influence the way we relate to one another in the rest of our lives—and that this change will be driven not just by women hosts, but by the increasing number of women listeners who are tuning in.Back in 2005, a survey done for advertisers by Podt...
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