Thelonious Monk. Jazz giant. American hipster. A new biography takes us into his life and enigmatic music.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the Harvard professor who has been much in the news this week – and was a big topic in our news roundtable  today – had a thought-provoking conversation with Tom in 2006.

Novelist Joseph O’Neill’s award-winning novel, “Netherland,” has been on the president’s nightstand. We talk with O’Neill, and with writer James McBride, about its themes of American identity.

Author Colson Whitehead on his new novel, “Sag Harbor,” a coming-of-age story in Long Island’s African-American summer community.

Louisiana author Tim Gautreaux and his new novel “The Missing” bring us a steamboat mystery on the Mississippi.

In the New Deal era, the Democrats owned the white working class. In the Civil Rights era, they lost them. Not all, of course, but enough to give Republicans win after big win.
This year, with economic challenges front and center again, the math could change. But in West Virginia and North Carolina, in Kentucky and [...]

“He does not speak for me,” says Barack Obama, of his former Chicago pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright. But Jeremiah Wright keeps speaking anyway.
After weeks of lying low, in the past week Rev. Wright has been all over: with Bill Moyers Friday night, preaching in Dallas and speaking before the NAACP on Sunday, taking questions at [...]

Barack Obama’s age of innocence has surely passed, in this long, hard season of campaigning. And now his very candidacy may hang on whether the American people saw him yesterday rising to a higher, wiser plane.
At a podium in Philadelphia, Obama took straight on the issue he has tried to sail above: Race in America. [...]

The prophetic and gospel messages of the Bible are pretty tough on worldly power and wealth and violence. From the Chicago pulpit of Barack Obama’s longtime minister, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, in the cadence and language of the black church, those messages sound like hellfire for a very worldly American superpower.
Now the preacher is retired and [...]

“Faith doesn’t just influence me,” Mike Huckabee told evangelicals last week. “It defines me.” And then he lost in South Carolina to John McCain.
In Nevada, labor lined up for Barack Obama, then Clinton took the vote. And Latinos carved their own way over political and color lines.
These are big players, speaking for the first time [...]

What a backslide. In the thick of one of the most exciting, boundary-breaking presidential campaigns in history, with a woman and an African-American out front in the Democratic Party, suddenly it sounds like a junior race war out there.
Candidates and surrogates are lobbing taunts and jibes. Bull Connor and LBJ are back from the pages [...]

Nobel Laureate James Watson set off a fury when he questioned whether Africans have the same intelligence as Caucasians.
So did journalist William Saletan, who defended Watson in a recent three-part series on race and IQ for Slate magazine, and highlighted research championed by white supremacists.
Saletan has apologized. But discomforting questions remain in the air.
We’ve invited [...]

It was the Double O Express, as Oprah Winfrey pumped up crowds for Barack Obama on Saturday from Iowa to South Carolina to New Hampshire.
For Hillary Clinton, the sight of Oprah and Obama drives home one of the great surprises — and ironies — of this historic campaign: that the first woman with a real [...]

Country singer Merle Haggard once said he thinks Ronald Reagan should be up on Mount Rushmore. Merle Haggard and a lot of other white American males.
Since Reagan marched on the White House with his “stand tall” message, white men have been the go-to backbone of GOP election victories — and the Democrats’ Achilles heal.
In ‘08, [...]

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When John Hope Franklin was six-years-old in rural Oklahoma, a white railway conductor literally threw this very young black American, and his mother, off the train — when they had the temerity to sit in a whites-only car. That was eighty-four years ago.
Now John Hope Franklin is ninety, and one of [...]