WASHINGTON — President Obama has tried to use the power of his office to combat sexual assaults on college campuses. On Friday, he got some help.
In a speech from the East Room, the president announced “It’s on Us,” a nationwide public service campaign aimed at urging young people to do more to prevent campus sexual assaults. Mr. Obama called for a “fundamental shift in our culture” in the way women are treated and in the response to victims of sexual assault.
“From sports leagues to pop culture to politics, our society does not sufficiently value women,” Mr. Obama said. “We still don’t condemn sexual assault as loudly as we should.”
At the event, the administration debuted a 30-second video, which features celebrities including the actors Kerry Washington and Jon Hamm, the musician Questlove, and NBA star Kevin Love.
Officials said the celebrities involved would know how to get through to the millennial generation.
Mr. Love, who plays for the Cleveland Cavaliers, and Olivia Munn, an actress in the HBO series “The Newsroom,” attended the announcement. Mr. Obama also put a heavy emphasis on engaging men in the conversation.
“It is not just on parents of young women to caution them, it is on the parents of young men to teach them respect for women,” Mr. Obama said. “It is on grown men to set an example and be clear about what it means to be a man.”
Breakout Nick at Nite/NickMom family comedy series Instant Mom has been picked up for a 20-episode third season ahead of its second-season premiere on October 2, when it will debut in its new Thursday 8 PM time slot on Nick at Nite. The multi-camera series stars Tia Mowry-Hardrict as Stephanie, a former party girl who becomes a full-time stepmom to three kids when she marries the more traditional Charlie (Michael Boatman). “Instant Mom has proven to be the perfect breakout series for families to enjoy together on Nick at Nite,” said Russell Hicks, Nickelodeon’s President of Content Development and Production.
The pre-emptive Season 3 renewal is the latest vote of confidence to Instant Mom, which also received an order for seven additional episodes before its series premiere. The latest pickup brings the show’s episode total to 66 episodes. Season 1 posted double-digit year-to-year growth and drew 1.2 million total viewers. Additionally, the series launch of Instant Mom on the adult-targeted NickMom nighttime comedy block on the Nick Jr. channel was the block’s highest-rated premiere ever with women 18-49 and total viewers. Instant Mom is executive-produced by Howard Michael Gould, Aaron Kaplan of Kapital Entertainment and Regina Hicks. The series’ cast also includes Sheryl Lee Ralph, Sydney Park, Tylen Jacob Williams and Damarr Calhoun. article by Nellie Andreeva via deadline.com
A court said Brooklyn prosecutors buried documents in the kidnapping case of Everton Wagstaffe. (Credit: Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times)
Everton Wagstaffe, who refused to leave prison on probation because he viewed it as a surrender of his claim of innocence in the death of a teenage girl, learned on Wednesday that he had prevailed in a struggle that he began from behind bars nearly 23 years ago.
A panel of state appeals court judges unanimously reversed the kidnapping convictions of Mr. Wagstaffe and his co-defendant, Reginald Connor, finding that Brooklyn prosecutors in 1992 and 1993 were responsible for “burying” documents that might have shown that detectives and the prime witness had lied. The panel also dismissed the indictments of the two men.
A spokeswoman for Kenneth P. Thompson, the Brooklyn district attorney, who has pledged to aggressively hunt down injustice, said the decision was being reviewed. Reginald Connor’s conviction was also reversed. (Credit: Piotr Redlinski for The New York Times)
Mr. Connor, 46, served 15 years, and now works for a film-production company. For the moment, Mr. Wagstaffe, 45, remains in state prison. He has been in custody since his arrest at age 23 in January 1992.
Over the years, he has refused to accept release on any terms — such as parole or probation — that would imply he had something to do with the kidnapping and death of Jennifer Negron, a 16-year-old girl whose body was found on a street in the East New York section of Brooklyn on Jan. 1, 1992. “Finally,” Mr. Connor said on Wednesday afternoon, sounding dazed. “Finally.”
He learned of the decision just after leaving a meeting with lawyers from Davis Polk & Wardwell, who had been representing him pro bono for the last several years.
Mr. Wagstaffe first heard of the ruling in a call with a family member, who asked not to be identified, but said Mr. Wagstaffe had insisted that the entire ruling be read to him. “ ‘You cry for both of us,’ ” the family member quoted Mr. Wagstaffe as saying. “ ‘I want to research part of it.’ ”
If the case comes to an end now, it would be the final chapter of an epic guerrilla legal battle waged by Mr. Wagstaffe. He entered prison with minimal literacy and taught himself to read. He then wrote hundreds of letters pleading for help in finding the physical evidence from the case so DNA testing could be done, and in finding missing witnesses. For much of that time, he had no legal counsel. He drafted his own legal papers and succeeded in being granted hearings, though not in getting any relief.
This morning the MacArthur Foundation named the recipients of the 2014 MacArthur Fellowship, commonly referred to as the “genius grants.” The class includes four visionary members of the African-American community whose work, discoveries, and ideas are advancing their fields and our understanding of our world. The MacArthur Fellowship is a “no strings attached” award that comes with a stipend of $625,000, paid out in equal quarterly installments over five years. This year’s fellows are: Jennifer Eberhardt Jennifer Eberhardt, a social psychologist investigating the subtle, unconscious ways people racially code and categorize others, with a particular focus on how race and visual perceptions of people affect policing and criminal sentencing. Rick Lowe Rick Lowe, a public artist using art to reimagine and revitalize struggling communities. His program has transformed derelict properties in Houston’s predominantly African American Third Ward into a visionary arts venue and community center. He has since begun similar work in other cities, including current projects in Dallas and Philadelphia. Steve Coleman Steve Coleman, a jazz composer and saxophonist infusing traditional jazz with an eclectic range of other musical styles, including music from West Africa, South India, Brazil, and Cuba. Terrance Hayes Terrance Hayes, a poet crafting musical, almost improvisational verse that delves into issues of race, gender, current events, and family. He often uses humorous wordplay and references to pop culture, including poems that speak in the voices of David Bowie, Jorge Luis Borges, and Strom Thurmond.
To see the list of 2013 African American MacArthur Fellows, click here. article by Lori Lakin Hutcherson (follow @lakinhutcherson)
Shawon Jackson went to Princeton University via the Questbridge program and is president of the student government there. (Michael Kirby Smith, NEW YORK TIMES)
Arianna Trickey was opening a piece of mail in her bedroom during junior year of high school when a pamphlet fell out of the envelope. The pamphlet seemed to offer the impossible: the prospect of a full scholarship to several of her dream colleges.
She went running out to her father, a house painter, who was sitting on the family’s porch in Grass Valley, a California city in the Sierra Nevada foothills. “You have to see this,” she told him. “This is the scholarship that will get me to the best schools in the country.”
The pamphlet was from a nonprofit organization called QuestBridge, which has quietly become one of the biggest players in elite-college admissions. Almost 300 undergraduates at Stanford this year, or 4 percent of the student body, came through QuestBridge. The share at Amherst is 11 percent, and it’s 9 percent at Pomona. At Yale, the admissions office has changed its application to make it more like QuestBridge’s.
Founded by a married couple in Northern California — she an entrepreneur, he a doctor-turned-medical-investor — QuestBridge has figured out how to convince thousands of high-achieving, low-income students that they really can attend a top college. “It’s like a national admissions office,” said Catharine Bond Hill, the president of Vassar.
The growth of QuestBridge has broader lessons for higher education — and for closing the yawning achievement gap between rich and poor teenagers. That gap is one of the biggest reasons that moving up the economic ladder is so hard in the United States today. But QuestBridge’s efforts are innovative enough to deserve their own attention.
In addition to the hundreds of its students on college campuses today, hundreds more have graduated over the last decade. They’ve gone on to become professors, teachers, business people, doctors and many other things. Ms. Trickey, a senior at the University of Virginia who is also getting a master’s in education, plans to become an elementary-school teacher in a low-income area.
College admissions officers attribute the organization’s success to the simplicity of its approach to students. It avoids mind-numbingly complex talk of financial-aid forms and formulas that scare away so many low-income families (and frustrate so many middle-income families, like my own when I was applying to college). QuestBridge instead gives students a simple message: If you get in, you can go.
Yet the broader lessons of QuestBridge aren’t only about how to communicate with students. They’re also how our society spends the limited resource that is financial aid.
The group’s founders, Michael and Ana Rowena McCullough, are now turning their attention to the estimated $3 billion in outside scholarships, from local Rotary Clubs, corporations and other groups, that are awarded every year to high school seniors. The McCulloughs see this money as a wasted opportunity, saying it comes too late to affect whether and where students go to college. It doesn’t help the many high-achieving, low-income strivers who don’t apply to top colleges — and often don’t graduate from any college.
“Any private scholarship given at the end of senior year is intrinsically disconnected from the college application process,” Dr. McCullough said, “and it doesn’t have to be.”
They plan to offer prizes in some cases to high school juniors, like a summer program or a free laptop, to persuade them to apply. To win the prize, the junior would need to fill out a detailed application, which could become the basis for his or her college application. The idea draws on social science research, which has shown that people often respond better to tangible, short-term incentives (a free laptop) than to complicated, longer-term ones (a college degree, which will improve your life and which you can afford). Two pilot programs started with donors — one focused on New Yorkers, one on low-income Jewish students — have had encouraging results, the McCulloughs say.
QuestBridge has its roots in summer programs they started as Stanford students in the 1980s and 1990s. The initial one helped Dr. McCullough, who had paid his own way through Stanford, win a Rhodes scholarship.
Terranisha Hiley is a senior at Columbia University. (Ruth Fremson, NEW YORK TIMES)
The programs tried to lift the ambitions of talented teenagers from modest backgrounds, by introducing them to peers and to successful adults. “The combination of seeing what can be done and then having someone you respect telling you you can do it — I think that’s what most young people need,” said Nico Slate, who attended a program in 1996. A native of a small town in the Mojave Desert, he is now a history professor at Carnegie Mellon and studies social movements in India and the United States.
Eventually, the McCulloughs realized the growing applicant pool to their summer program consisted of exactly the students whom top colleges said they wanted to recruit. So the couple began approaching admissions officers with plans for a new program the colleges would help pay for. QuestBridge uses traditional databases, like those with SAT scores, as well as networks of high school teachers and others to recruit students. It has an early application deadline, in late September, and a long application form, designed to get students to tell the story of their lives.
Academy Award winner and Lancôme Beauty AmbassadorLupita Nyong’o stopped by “Sesame Street” to talk to Elmo about the importance and beauty of skin.
“Elmo’s skin just happens to be very ticklish. Lupita’s skin happens to be a beautiful brown color. Skin can come in all different shades and colors. Isn’t skin just the best? However, ticklish or smooth or black or brown or white or tan, be sure to love the skin you are in.”
See video below:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIC2hHECZ6Y&w=560&h=315] article via newsone.com
‘To me, it’s a way for people to see what exists and to give voice to many of these artists who were silenced for so long,’ Cosby said. (Photograph: Rick Cinclair/AP)
After amassing a private collection of African-American art over four decades, Bill Cosby and his wife Camille plan to showcase their holdings for the first time in an exhibition planned at the Smithsonian Institution.
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art announced Monday that the entire Cosby collection will go on view in November in a unique exhibit juxtaposing African-American art with African art.
The collection, which will be loaned to the museum, includes works by such leading African-American artists as Beauford Delaney, Faith Ringgold, Jacob Lawrence, Augusta Savage and Henry Ossawa Tanner. The Cosby collection of more than 300 African American paintings, prints, sculptures and drawings has never been loaned or seen publicly, except for one work of art.
“It’s so important to show art by African-American artists in this exhibition,” Cosby said in a written statement. “To me, it’s a way for people to see what exists and to give voice to many of these artists who were silenced for so long, some of whom will speak no more.”
The exhibit, “Conversations: African and African American Artworks in Dialogue”, will open November 9th and will be on view through early 2016 in Washington. It will be organized by themes, placing pieces from African artists in the Smithsonian collection near similar works from African-American artists in Cosby’s collection. Curators said it will explore ideas about history, creativity, power, identity and artistry.
Some highlights include rare 18th and early 19th-century portraits by Baltimore-based artist Joshua Johnston, explorations of black spirituality in the 1894 piece “The Thankful Poor” by Henry Ossawa Tanner and Cosby family quilts.
“The exhibition will encourage all of us to draw from the creativity that is Africa, to recognize the shared history that inextricably links Africa and the African diaspora and to seek the common threads that weave our stories together,” said museum director Johnnetta Betsch Cole, in announcing the exhibit.
The exhibition of Cosby’s collection is part of the African art museum’s 50th anniversary. article via theguardian.com
The African Choir were a group of young South African singers that toured Britain between 1891 and 1893. They were formed to raise funds for a Christian school in their home country and performed for Queen Victoria at Osborne House, a royal residence on the Isle of Wight. At some point during their stay, they visited the studio of the London Stereoscopic Company to have group and individual portraits made on plate-glass negatives. That long-lost series of photographs, unseen for 120 years, is the dramatic centrepiece of an illuminating new exhibition called Black Chronicles II.
“The portraits were last shown in the London Illustrated News in 1891,” says Renée Mussai, who has co-curated the show at London’s Rivington Place alongside Mark Sealy MBE, director of Autograph ABP, a foundation that focuses on black cultural identity often through the use of overlooked archives. “The Hulton Archive, where they came from, did not even know they existed until we uncovered them while excavating their archive as part of my PhD project.”
The London Stereoscopic Company specialised in carte de visites – small photographs printed on cards that were often traded by collectors or used by performers for publicity purposes – and, as their name suggests, they were all in stereo which, when seen through a special viewer, gave the illusion of a three-dimensional photograph.
The enlarged portraits of the African Choir, which line one wall of the exhibition, were made by Mike Spry, a specialist in printing from glass plates who was coaxed out of retirement to undertake the meticulous process in his garden shed. They are arresting both for the style and assurance of the sitters – some of the women look like they could be modelling for Vogue – and for the way they challenge the received narrative of the history of black people in Britain.
“Black Chronicles II is part of a wider ongoing project called The Missing Chapter,” says Mussai, “which uses the history of photography to illuminate the missing chapters in British history and culture, especially black history and culture. There is a widespread misconception that black experience in Britain begins with the arrival of the Empire Windrush and the first Jamaican immigrants in 1948, but, as this exhibition shows, there is an incredible archive of images of black people in Britain that goes right back to the invention of photography in the 1830s.”
Near the African choir shots, there is an equally striking portrait of Major Musa Bhai, a Ceylon-born Muslim who was converted to Christianity in colonial India. He accompanied the family of William Booth, founder of theSalvation Army, to England in 1888 as a high-profile advocate for the organisation. As Mussai notes, there “are several intertwining narratives – colonial, cultural and personal – embedded in these images, but what is often startling is how confident and self-contained many of the sitters are as they occupy the frame.”
Sara Forbes Bonetta. Brighton, 1862. (Photograph: Courtesy of Paul Frecker collection/The Library of Nineteenth-Century Photography)
Black Chronicles II is punctuated by several such surprising shots, some of well-known people but many of ordinary individuals caught up in the indiscriminate sweep of colonial and postcolonial history. Among the former is Sara Forbes Bonetta, perhaps the most celebrated black British Victorian, who was photographed by two pre-eminent portrait photographers, Camilla Silvy and Julia Margaret Cameron.
Captured aged five by slave raiders in west Africa, Forbes Bonetta was rescued by Captain Frederick E Forbes, then presented as a “gift” to Queen Victoria. Forbes, who rechristened the child after his ship, the Bonetta, later wrote of the proud moment when he realised that Forbes Bonetta “would be a present from the King of the Blacks to the Queen of the Whites.”
More haunting is the portrait of Dejazmatch Alamayou Tewodros, an Ethiopian prince who was orphaned at the age of seven, when his father died rather than surrender to the British troops that had surrounded his castle in what was then Abyssinia. Alamayou was brought to England by Sir Robert Napier and adopted by the intriguingly named explorer Captain Tristram Speedy. Alamayou died in England of pleurisy in 1879.
Joe Sample at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 2011. His last solo album, “Children of the Sun,” is to be released this fall. (Credit: Jean-Christophe Bott/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images)
Joe Sample, who became a jazz star in the 1960s as the pianist with the Jazz Crusaders and an even bigger star a decade later when he began playing electric keyboards and the group simplified its name to the Crusaders, died on Friday in Houston. He was 75.
The cause was mesothelioma, said his manager, Patrick Rains.
The Jazz Crusaders, who played the muscular, bluesy variation on bebop known as hard bop, had their roots in Houston, where Mr. Sample, the tenor saxophonist Wilton Felder and the drummer Nesbert Hooper (better known by the self-explanatory first name Stix) began performing together as the Swingsters while in high school.
Mr. Sample met the trombonist Wayne Henderson at Texas Southern University and added him, the bassist Henry Wilson and the flutist Hubert Laws — who would soon achieve considerable fame on his own — to the group, which changed its name to the Modern Jazz Sextet.
The band worked in the Houston area for several years but did not have much success until Mr. Sample, Mr. Felder, Mr. Hooper and Mr. Henderson moved to Los Angeles and changed their name to the Jazz Crusaders, a reference to the drummer Art Blakey’s seminal hard-bop ensemble, the Jazz Messengers. Their first album, “Freedom Sound,” released on the Pacific Jazz label in 1961, sold well, and they recorded prolifically for the rest of the decade, with all four members contributing compositions, while performing to enthusiastic audiences and critical praise.
In the early 1970s, as the audience for jazz declined, the band underwent yet another name change, this one signifying a change in musical direction. Augmenting their sound with electric guitar and electric bass, with Mr. Sample playing mostly electric keyboards, the Jazz Crusaders became the Crusaders. Their first album under that name, “Crusaders 1,” featuring four compositions by Mr. Sample, was released on the Blue Thumb label in 1972.
“No Good Deed” lead the box office this weekend by taking in $24.5 million from 2,175 theaters, easily beating expectations. Going into the weekend, analysts expected the home invasion thriller to hover around $20 million. Females made up the bulk of the audience, taking up 60% of the seats in theaters, and 41% of ticket-buyers were under 30 years old.
“It’s not a full reversal of the weakness at the box office, but it’s a step in the right direction,” said Phil Contrino, vice president and chief analyst at BoxOffice.com. “It’s good to see new films enter the marketplace and do all right.”
“No Good Deed’s” success is a feather in the cap of stars IdrisElba and Taraji P. Henson, both of whom actively hawked the film on social media.
“They absolutely elevated it,” said Rory Bruer, Sony Pictures’ president of worldwide distribution. “They’re so hard working. It was a great collaboration.”
It also helps that “No Good Deed” cost a mere $13 million to produce. “It’s going to be hugely successful for the studio,” said Bruer.
Both actors will likely see their stars rise as a result. Elba has had showy supporting roles in “Thor” and “Prometheus,” but hasn’t carried a film to these kind of heights on his own shoulders since 2009’s “Obsessed.” He retains a passionate following from his days playing a drug kingpin on HBO’s “The Wire.”
Henson has an Oscar nomination on her resumé thanks to 2008’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and was part of the “Think Like a Man” ensemble, but hasn’t been front-and-center in a promotional campaign like she was here.
“I wouldn’t call them full on movie stars in their own right,” said Phil Contrino, vice president and analyst with BoxOffice.com. “They’re not bankable on their own terms, but this could certainly change that. Sometimes all it takes is one film.”
The concept of movie stardom has taken its knocks in recent years, as Hollywood has tried and failed to launch a new generation of A-listers to rival the Tom Cruises and Julia Roberts of an earlier era. The old days where an actor’s name above the title was enough to guarantee a big opening weekend have vanished. However, pairing the right actor with the right vehicle can still reap dividends, as evidenced by Liam Neeson’s success playing avenging angels and Melissa McCarthy’s track record with R-rated comedies.
“Taraji and Idris are terrific actors and they both so own their roles in this film,” said Rory Bruer, Sony Pictures’ president of worldwide distribution. “In spots and trailers, they delivered such a great intensity. It’s a terrific opening.”
Sony didn’t rely on star power alone to sell “No Good Deed.” It also orchestrated a clever social media campaign that unspooled across Twitter and Instagram.
On Twitter, the studio put a fresh spin on the Choose Your Own Adventure book series, presenting users with a set of challenges that dared them to outwit a murderer. For fans of Instagram, Sony created an interactive experience made up of images and videos that teased out parts of the film’s plot. That’s cheaper and potentially more potent than a costly television campaign.
“In this new world we live in, you want to be aggressive, and there are more means to do that and interact directly with fans than ever before,” said Contrino.
article by Brent Lang via variety.com (additions by Lori Lakin Hutcherson)
