Politics is work. Hiphop is music. The idea that hiphop, because it makes the body feel good to move to it and it makes the soul feel good to hear out angry young black men, can be transmuted into changing the world is narcotic but nonsensical. Wherever hiphop is ever "going," we can be sure it will not be in a constructive direction, anymore than fashions in the color of cars. And it shouldn't "concern" us in the least.

Obama is seen as very, very cool. I think a lot of people find him sexy.

No longer can we measure compassion by how much we spend on poverty but how many people we help to lift out of poverty.

People think of black English as ungrammatical, but it bears the same relationship to standard English as contemporary Hebrew does to ancient Hebrew.

Texting is very loose in its structure. No one thinks about capital letters or punctuation when one texts, but then again, do you think about those things when you talk?

I don't think that we really know a whole lot about Barack Obama at all that you would really call distinctive.

Loving your language means a command of its vocabulary beyond the level of the everyday.