Lewis Baldwin on Capturing the True Spirit of King
Black History Month: Personal Histories

Media Roundup: Anita Hill, Boomerang Kids, and What Great-Grandma Really Ate

Boomerang benefits: adult children return home "new and improved." Katherine Newman in Time Ideas. We hope so: about a fifth of men aged 25 to 34 are back at home! For more, listen to this interview on Marketplace Money.

Anita Hill discussed housing and poverty with Melissa Harris-Perry on her new (and fantastic) MSNBC Sunday morning show. Also check out her turn as a Sunday morning pundit on a panel with Maria Teresa Kumar, Harry Smith and Michael Steele. And read our Storify collection of the best tweets about the show.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

"What Would Great-Grandma Eat?"  Aaron Bobrow-Strain in the Chronicle Review. A tasty excerpt:

For many foodies in contemporary America, of course, the past has no pitfalls. For them, yesteryear is a land where everyone grew up instinctively knowing the difference between "real" and "fake" food—wisdom we seem to have lost. Recently this attitude has crystallized in a popular axiom echoed from the pages of Pollan's Food Rules to the set of Oprah: If your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize it as food, don't eat it.

It's a simple, homey rule with immediate nostalgic appeal. I can even look past its questionable cultural assumptions. (My great-grandmother wouldn't have recognized many of my favorite Ethiopian, Thai, and Mexican dishes as human food.) But, as I dug into the history of battles over bread, I realized that this whole nostalgic perspective had a bigger problem: What if Great-Grandmother was just as conflicted about food as we are?

While researching my book, I discovered that my own great-grandmother's relation to her family's staple food was far less straightforward than I would have assumed. Her story suggests a lot about the contradictory mix of anxieties and aspirations tugging at the mind of early-20th-century eaters when they chose their bread.

A review of Hanne Blank's Straight on Indian Country Today Media Network looks at how the book speaks to two-spirit people

 

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