Alfre Woodard has been elected to play Madame President in Katherine Heigl‘s new political drama State of Affairs. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the drama described as Scandal meets The West Wing, will see the 12 Years a Slave actress as President Roberta Payton.
Woodard’s character enlists a CIA agent, played by Heigl, to give her counsel on incidents around the world. The plot follows Heigl as she takes on the role of targeting America’s most critical threats while balancing the demands of a complex personal life.
The casting puts Woodard in the company of several other African-American women leads on pilots this season including Taraji P. Henson, Viola Davisand Octavia Spencer. article by Dominique Hobdy via essence.com
Story via CNN: article by Mick Ebeling, founder of Not Impossible Labs and The Ebeling Group.
It’s a good thing I didn’t know exactly how dangerous a trip I was embarking on, because when I left home in October 2013 to fly to Sudan, I was scared enough. What I had committed to was, quite frankly, the most “impossible” thing I’d ever tried to accomplish.
Three months earlier, over dinner, I’d learned about a doctor in Sudan’s Nuba mountains, Dr. Tom Catena, who was treating thousands of people — many of them children — who’d had limbs blown off in the Sudanese government’s bombing raids. By coincidence, we’d just posted an article to our website about Richard Van As, an amazing inventor who created a low-cost, 3-D printed prosthetic hand. So, over a second beer, I raised the possibility — wouldn’t it be cool if we brought printers over to Sudan and made arms for these kids?
The story might have ended there — one of those plans you cook up over dinner and forget by breakfast. Really, what can one person do in the face of such widespread sorrow thousands of miles away?
But when I got home and looked up Dr. Catena, I read about one of the patients he’d treated: Daniel — a 12-year-old boy who, in attempting to protect himself from an aerial attack, wrapped his arms around a tree. The tree protected his body, but both his arms were blown off by the bomb that exploded those few meters away.
The amputation and hospital treatment had saved his life, but when Daniel woke and realized what had happened he said he wished he would have died. It was one of the most heart-wrenching stories I’d ever read.
It was 11pm. I looked down the hallway to where my three boys were sleeping and thought, “What if it were my kid?” What if this happened to them and somebody out there could help them — and didn’t?
In that moment, I realized I couldn’t just close the computer, get a glass of water and go to bed. I had to do something.
Going to Sudan try to help thousands of people was way too daunting. There was no way I could get my head around that. I couldn’t help the many. But I could help one. I could help Daniel. Crash course in 3–D printing
Mind you, at the time I knew very little about 3-D printing, and even less about prosthetic arms. So I did what I always do: surround myself with smart people, shut up, and absorb their brilliance. I brought together all the experts — including the great Van As himself — to give me a crash course in 3-D printing and prosthetic arms.
Step 1: 3-D print the files.
Step 2: Soften orthoplastic in hot water, then wrap it around the patient’s limb to mold the custom-fitted, medical-grade, breathable plastic that will anchor the printed components.
Step 3: Attach the hand and the gauntlet, and thread the cabling through each digit, running it back to an attachment point behind the patient’s wrist or elbow. The motion of the wrist (up and down) or elbow (side to side) then pulls on the cabling and draws the fingers to a close. In short, the cables tense and release around a pivot point.
Morgan State University, back-to-back national champions, look to three-peat at the 2014 25th anniversary Honda Campus All-Star Challenge
Brainpower from America’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) will be on display at the 25th annual Honda Campus All-Star Challenge (HCASC) National Championship Tournament. Hundreds of HBCU students have spent the past year diligently preparing to compete in the final round of this unique academic tournament, April 12-16, 2014, on the campus of American Honda Motor Co., Inc., in Torrance, California.
This year’s road to the championship began in the fall of 2013, with 76 HBCUs vying for the final 48 slots. Through countless hours of study, drills and practice, elite teams emerged, knowledgeable and ready to take on the competition. Their goal is to beat Morgan State University, the reigning national champions with two consecutive titles, while Morgan State will be seeking a threepeat.
The competitors will be split into eight divisions and will compete in a modified round-robin format. The top two teams from each division will advance to the “Sweet 16” and will compete in a single elimination playoff. The final two teams that emerge from the playoffs will compete for the title of National Champions and the grand prize of $50,000. The grand prize, along with the other institutional grants, will support academic activities at the participating HBCUs.
MEMPHIS, TN – (WMC-TV) – You’re never too old to graduate high school and 92-year-old Memphis native Dorothy Owens is proving that.
Owens’ father died and because of a leg injury, she was forced to drop out of high school. She started working to help support her family. However, Owens has always encouraged her children and grandchildren to pursue education. Her granddaughter made it her goal to grant the one wish her grandma has ever requested. Owens’ granddaughters wrote a letter to her high school, Booker T. Washington, asking for an honorary diploma.
This February, on her 92nd birthday, she received an honorary diploma from Booker T. Washington High School. Owens was overjoyed with the Certificate of Attendance. To watch video of this story, click here. Copyright 2014 WMC-TV. All rights reserved.
“The air in the strange environment of this city is dense with story, and it draws me into thinking of life as stories,” Cole’s unnamed narrator says halfway through the novel, as he becomes more deeply immersed in the disorder, the striving, the corruption and the inventiveness of Lagos and its people. “The narratives fly at me from all directions … And that literary texture of lives full of unpredictable narrative, is what appeals.”
Cole earned a large following in the United States for his PEN Faulkner Award-winning Open City, published in 2011. That novel told the story of a Nigerian immigrant and his wanderings in New York City and other places. The U.S.-born Cole was raised and educated in Nigeria. Before he wrote Open City, he had written Every Day Is for the Thief, his first book, published in Nigeria in 2007, and which Random House is now issuing in the United States for the first time.
If you’re totally overwhelmed by trying to figure out scholarships and paying for college, look no further than the second annual Scholarship Marathon! It’s free, it’s online and it’s taking place today, Saturday, March 22. College Greenlight, which helps low-income and underrepresented students go to college, and Cappex, which has helped five million students decide on colleges, are the two groups behind this.
Today you’ll have access to chatrooms with scholarship experts (to answer all your Q’s) and webinars that explain financial aid and scholarships. Webinars like “The Science Behind the Ultimate Scholarship Essay” and “Winning Big Money Scholarships.” They’re also there to help you search for more scholarships you don’t even know about.
To top it off, they’re going to have hourly raffles for Amazon gift cards (because everybody loves a good raffle) and they have two $1,000 scholarships ready to be given to participants! This is going on from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. CDT, but you can drop in whenever you want.
If you want to take part, you just need to sign up at the site. Remember, it’s free, so you def ought to check it out if college is your jam! And if you want to spread the good word on this, you can tweet the hashtag #scholarshipmarathon. Hopefully the second annual Scholarship Marathon will be even bigger and better than the first one! article by Danica Davidson via act.mtv.com
Michelle Obama delivered remarks at Peking University in Beijing. (Credit: Wang Zhao/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images)
BEIJING — On a visit that was supposed to be nonpolitical, first lady Michelle Obama delivered an unmistakable message to the Chinese on Saturday, saying in a speech here that freedom of speech, particularly on the Internet and in the news media, provided the foundation for a vibrant society.
On the second day of a weeklong trip to China with her two daughters and her mother, Mrs. Obama spoke to an audience of Americans and Chinese at Peking University, and in the middle of an appeal for more American students to study abroad, she also talked of the value for people of hearing “all sides of every argument.” “Time and again, we have seen that countries are stronger and more prosperous when the voices and opinions of all their citizens can be heard,” she said. The United States, she said, respected the “uniqueness” of other cultures and societies. “But when it comes to expressing yourself freely,” she said, “and worshiping as you choose, and having open access to information — we believe those are universal rights that are the birthright of every person on this planet.”
The forthright exposition of the American belief in freedom of speech came against a backdrop of broad censorship of the Internet by the Chinese government. The government polices the Internet to prevent the nation’s 500 million users from seeing antigovernment sentiment, and blocks a variety of foreign websites, including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. The authorities compel domestic Internet sites to censor themselves.
Longtime music executive Sylvia Rhone has officially been named the president of Epic Records. Rhone headed Elektra Entertainment Group, then Universal Motown for nearly two decades. Her new appointment comes just a year after she launched Vested in Culture (VIC), her joint venture with Epic. VIC will remain an imprint of the label. Rhone served as president of Universal Motown Records before joining Epic in 2013.
“I’m honored to have the opportunity to expand my relationship with the talented team and amazing artists at Epic,” Rhone said in a statement. “What makes this opportunity different from any other is my partnership with renowned music executive L.A. Reid. I’m looking forward to what I think will be the finest chapter in my career.” article by Erika Benton-Martin via thesource.com
“Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids” is among the animated series highlighted in a new traveling exhibition at the Schomburg Center for Black Culture. CreditCollection of Museum of UnCut Funk
Growing up in the 1970s at opposite ends of New York State, two girls were immersed in all things cool, black and funky.
Saturday morning cartoons won their hearts. Loreen Williamson, in Rochester, and Pamela Thomas, in the Bronx, would park themselves in front of the The Jackson 5ive, featuring a tiny Michael sporting a big Afro, and Josie and the Pussycats, with the black tambourine-playing Valerie Brown performing in a hip girl band.
Eventually, the two met and bonded over their mutual interests. Not content to leave the funk (or their pasts) behind, Ms. Williamson, now 49, and Ms. Thomas, 51, have amassed more than 300 pieces of black animation art from the 1960s and ’70s, a collection that they believe is one of the world’s most extensive in that field. In 2007, they created the Museum of UnCut Funk, an online showcase for original animation cels, posters, storyboards and other objects celebrating black culture of the 1970s and its standard-bearers. Now, the two collectors have hit the road with a traveling museum exhibition, Funky Turns 40: Black Character Revolution, which represents 24 animated productions, including Saturday morning and after-school cartoons and animated feature films.
Pamela Thomas, left, and Loreen Williamson, who created the exhibition, have have amassed more than 300 pieces of black animation art from the 1960s and ’70s. (Photo Credit: Christopher Gregory for The New York Times)
The revolution that it documents is from stereotype to superhero: Funky, which is currently at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem and will travel to museums in Chicago, Seattle and West Reading, Pa.honors the cartoons’ image-affirming black characters, including those of The Harlem Globetrotters, Kid Power, Schoolhouse Rock and Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids.
The programs are more than entertaining nostalgia, the two curators and some cultural historians say. They represent the fruits of a struggle for a say in the representation of blacks in television images, among other rights, and the newfound ability of popular black entertainers to get such programming on the air, based on their own appeal to a wide audience.
The shows offered a striking counterpoint to the previous stereotypical portrayals of blacks as buffoons in mainstream films, books, theater, advertising and cartoons. “It shows a time in American history when art and diversity and civil rights aspirations all came together,” said Christopher P. Lehman, a professor of ethnic studies at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota and the author of The Colored Cartoon: Black Representation in American Animated Short Films, 1907-1954 (University of Massachusetts Press). “Before 1970, African-Americans were not much on television at all, except as the domestic servants of Jack Benny and Danny Thomas or as guests on variety series.”
It was no accident that Hey, Hey, Hey, It’s Fat Albert, described by curators as the first “positive” black-cast cartoon on TV (and the basis of the later series), was an NBC prime-time special in 1969, or, in the same vein, The Jackson 5ive, the first Saturday morning cartoon series featuring black musicians, made its debut in 1971. Both were created by two entertainment powerhouses, Bill Cosby (Fat Albert and the gang were part of his stand-up comedy routine) and Berry Gordy Jr., the founder of Motown Records, who marketed the family music act to appeal to the broadest possible audience.
Recalling her generation’s response, Ms. Williamson, who works as an independent consultant for marketing and business, said, “We got to see Martin Luther King’s dream, at least in cartoon form.”
“There was a lot of cross-pollination with what was going on in black culture,” she said. “You could watch the cartoons, go to the concerts, see the stars on variety shows. And our white friends were watching, too.” Ms. Thomas, a preschool teacher, said: “It made me feel like, wow, I see myself on TV. I started feeling good about myself.”
Lionsgate and Roadside Attractions have acquired all U.S. and Canadian rights to Dear White People, which premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival. Written and directed by Justin Simien, Dear White People follows the stories of four black students at Winchester University, where a riot breaks out over a popular ‘African American’ themed party thrown by a white fraternity.
The comedy, Co-starring Tyler James Williams (Everybody Hates Chris) and Tessa Thompson (Veronica Mars), won the Special Jury Award for Breakthrough Talent at Sundance. “Justin Simien is a funny, fresh and current voice with his finger on the Millennials’ pulse,” said Roadside’s co-president Howard Cohen. article via Variety.com
Longtime music executive Sylvia Rhone has officially been named the president of Epic Records. Rhone headed Elektra Entertainment Group, then Universal Motown for nearly two decades. Her new appointment comes just a year after she launched Vested in Culture (VIC), her joint venture with Epic. VIC will remain an imprint of the label. Rhone served as president of Universal Motown Records before joining Epic in 2013.
