Stooges Brass Band, a mainstay in second line parades and bar shows around New Orleans, have earned growing recognition in the broader music world for their creative incorporation of modern musical elements within a brass band framework.

Recent accomplishments include winning the Red Bull Street Kings brass band competition…

When I recently joined the teeming masses of music lovers descending on New Orleans for the 2013 Jazz And Heritage Festival, my ignorance of the city weighed more than my backpack. I had a (very) limited budget, no knowledge of how to get around, and zero insight into where to…

It’s easy to get caught up in the seemingly unending torrent of things in the world that, frankly speaking, suck nasty toe cheese. There’s the ongoing effort by the world of high finance to turn the global economy into a gated community, with most of us on the wrong side…

The first information I saw about the Boston Marathon bombing was a Facebook post from BuzzFeed. Within minutes, Huffington Post had a “live update” page going. Over the next few hours, media outlet updates mixed with personal reactions, which were mostly variations on expressions of horror at the bombing and…

I came of age amid the opening cusp of the time of the standardized test. During elementary school, the California Achievement Test came around every year to classify the dumbs from the smarts, and offer parents tangible quantification of their child’s intellectual worth.

I loved the tests. I was great…

In a recent column discussing the tragic death of Kimani Gray, the teenager gunned down by plainclothes NYPD officers, I left one important aspect of the story untouched: the fact that Kimani Gray was a young black male. The omission was intentional, an effort not to reduce the tragedy to…

We got hustled last Tuesday. The Supreme Court heard arguments about Proposition 8, and national attention was understandably fixated. Twitter exploded with pithy statements of support, Facebook turned into a sea of red equal signs (with a few contrary variations appearing on the pages of gay marriage opponents). Bloggers hung…

It’s been less than three weeks since NYPD bullets ended a 16-year-old’s life in East Flatbush. Less than two since a 21-year-old put a bullet through an old man’s brain near Prospect Park. God only knows what will happen before this goes to print.

Better journalists than myself have done…

In 1997, when scientists successfully grew a human ear on the back of a mouse—without the use of any genetic trickery—the photograph became one of the internet’s first truly viral hits. The biological science community touted it as a revolutionary breakthrough (which it was) but at the time, the idea…

Chris Dodd, former Democratic senator and supposed crusader against the corruption of Wall Street, cleared a cool $2.4 million in 2011 as head of the Motion Picture Association Of America. To earn his keep, Dodd became the film industry’s DC knee-breaker, twisting arms and greasing wheels in support of legislation…