I live in west Harlem. The neighborhood has seen a lot of changes over the years, much like the rest of New York, and it’s going through another one right now. At the moment, the neighborhood is predominantly black and Latino (mostly Dominican, but there are lots of other nationalities, too). But, as rents rise elsewhere and Columbia University buys huge pieces of lower Harlem for its students, the gentrification in New York is inching its way northward. More »

The old maxim “Leave it to the experts” is familiar because it’s usually good advice. We wouldn’t let anyone but highly trained doctors perform surgery on us. But sometimes even the most elite of experts must be called into question when they get carried away. Let’s say, a group of world-class physicists wanted to use a machine that would unlock the secrets of the universe, but it was also capable of destroying the planet. Some might think it’s time to take those experts down a few notches, right? More »

It’s time to start looking at our diets and their implications honestly. Our excessive consumption of meat isn’t just costing us our health, but our environment, as well. To top off the list of grievances, factory farming is one of the leading direct and indirect causes of air pollution in the world. More »

Americans have been astonished to see food prices soaring over the past few months, rising 3.9% in May 2008 alone. Everything from eggs to hamburgers is jumping as gas breaks $4.00 a gallon, making the expense of shipping food from farm to store much higher. During this phenomenon, the interesting note is Americans are changing their summer transportation habits to save money on gas, which makes up about 4% of their average budget. And while food makes up about 15% of our spending, few are considering changing diets to save money. More »

The East Coast is experiencing its first heat wave of the summer much earlier than expected. With temperatures of 100 in some places, and people from Georgia to Connecticut are looking grimly forward to a grueling summer season. If these high temperatures are any indication of what is to come, the eastern seaboard can expect higher temperatures for months to come, and the power outages that come with them. More »

The past month has been bursting with human suffering. There were terrible storms in the American midwest. There was a cyclone that killed tens of thousands in Myanmar, and there was an earthquake that resulted in thousands of deaths and thousands of more disappearances. It seems that the news has become a virtual parade of human suffering. And none of this is out of the ordinary. We have gotten used to it in recent years. More »

I’ve been having issues lately with the lack of manners in New York. No surprise there, since New Yorkers are infamous for rudeness, but sometimes people go beyond the call of being New Yorkers. I try not ask for perfect etiquette from everybody in a city as crowded as this one, but personally, I try to respect the people around me, if for no other reason than that it’s practical. More »

As I awoke this morning, I was met by a familiar radio host’s voice announcing the daily news and at the very end of the acknowledgements he slips in “oh yeah, its earth day”. His co-host laughs and says, “They want everyone to go-green today and going green for me is something I got to do behind closed doors with a towel underneath it.” More »

Tar Kingdom. Where is it? You can take one of two routes: 1) Idealistic 2) Realistic. Ideally, Tar Kingdom is where, in common black vernacular, all the ills that plague black people don’t exist. To list the ills will eat up too much paper (and post space); and black people already know what they are. Realistically, Tar Kingdom is the place we reference in modern-day music, specifically hip-hop, urban literature, and social round-tables of discussions about what black people don’t have. The operative questions become: Is “kingdom” necessarily synonymous with “perfection?” More »

TROUBL in Spain is useless without a mode of transportation. As cabs are so damn expensive because of the weak dollar, our only option is to rent a car. When they delivered my rental, I was appalled. “What!, Ford makes small cars- outside of America,” I said. Let me hold my reservations until I get into it, I thought. “Woooow, it’s a manual—ok, let’s see what I got on my hands. More »