The Dignity Index: Home of the Whiners | Newsweek Periscope

ART
Urban Outfitters
Sarah Ball 11/15/2008 12:00:00 AM
Kehinde Wiley would be the first to tell you that his game is tight. Wiley's paintings hang in the homes of celebrities (Denzel Washington, Elton John) and the halls of museums (the Brooklyn Museum, UCLA's Hammer Museum)—and he's just 31. His wry, outsize portraits of young black men posing as 18th-century noblemen draw five to six figures through Deitch Projects, the SoHo gallery reserved for the art world's ascending glitterati. And he's got the ego thing all squared away: he calls his work an exercise in "operatic bombastitude, admirably despondent to the pace and mores of polite society."
HOW HE DID IT 2008
The Age of Obama
Jon Meacham 11/5/2008 12:00:00 AM
He was, once, the consummate outsider. The first time Barack Obama saw the White House was a quarter century ago, in 1984, when he was working as a community organizer based at the Harlem campus of the City College of New York. President Reagan was proposing reductions in student aid. The young Obama, just out of Columbia, got together with student leaders—"most of them black, Puerto Rican, or of Eastern European descent, almost all of them the first in their families to attend college"—to take petitions protesting the cuts to the New York delegation on Capitol Hill. Afterward, Obama wrote in "The Audacity of Hope," the group wandered down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Washington Monument and then to the White House, where they stood outside the gates, looking in.
CAMPAIGN 2008
Election Confessions
Jessica Bennett 11/4/2008 12:00:00 AM
FACTCHECK.ORG
'Unethical?'
Emi Kolawole 10/27/2008 12:00:00 AM
The ad claims that Obama supporter and Chicago real estate developer Allison Davis received $20 million in taxpayer money. That's false. Davis didn't get this money. Instead, the federal grant went to the Chicago Housing Authority, replacing money it had already put forward for a mixed-income housing project on which Davis was a developer. The grant didn't go to Davis, nor did it help him pocket any additional funds.
COMEDY
The Gentleman from New York Now Has the Floor
Devin Gordon 9/20/2008 12:00:00 AM
Chris Rock stalked onto the stage at Harlem's Apollo Theater late on a Friday night earlier this month and opened his fifth HBO comedy special by explaining why it had been so long since the fourth. He wanted to wait, he told the audience, until the moment was just right. Rock has become the country's smartest, most essential comic by salting his punch lines with blunt social evangelism. And in a prior special, 1999's "Bigger and Blacker," he went on a riff about how the black community desperately needed a new generation of leaders, like Dr. Martin Luther King in his day—a not-uncontroversial stance, given that many of the old leaders were still very much alive. Now here was Rock, less than two months from a historic election, in the cathedral of African-American culture, arriving like a prophet to testify about Barack Obama. Everyone leaned forward: this is what we came for. To laugh, sure, but mostly to hear Rock on Barack. (HBO will air the special, "Kill the Messenger," on Sept. 27.)
TWO(?)-PARTY POLITICS TODAY
George F. Will
This is going to make your head hurt, but persevere. The complexities of the contest for governor of New York give a glimpse into what politics becomes when a vacuum of ideas is filled with race and pork.