Because of my mixed heritage I have been confused for pretty much all of your swarthy, hirsute ethnicities at one point or another—Jewish and Italian, obviously but also occasionally Hispanic, Greek, and even once, by a cab driver who unrelatedly treated me to a crash course in Syrian profanity, as Lebanese. I am a dark and hairy man, and that's part of the deal. (This is also why I won't get bed bugs.) Still, I am irritated every time this holiday (this holiday is Hanukkah, or however you spell it) rolls around and I am accosted in the street by furtive Hasidic men who look at me with searching eyes and say, "By any chance are you Jewish?" My answer is always no—I am only Jewish when I am around Italians, and vice versa—but when it happened again last night I was particularly irked, and I wondered why. I decided that perhaps it has something to do with how abstract the assumption is. This idea that you can somehow identify a person's characteristics and ancestry simply by judging their appearance and looking for telltale racial markers... how does one even encapsulate the concept? There oughta be a German word for that, I thought to myself, before even more sadly realizing that there almost certainly already is. READ MORE

Last week, The Paris Review's blog ran "Harvard and Class," a piece by Misha Glouberman (co-authored by Sheila Heti) about the challenges of dealing with class after attending "an upper-middle-class Jewish day school" in Canada and then going to Harvard—which, hmmm! As two recent Harvard grads ourselves, we wanted to offer a slightly different perspective on class, race and the Ivy League, as well as what it’s like to be offered $40 by your peers to remain invisible, please. READ MORE

Nebraska is starting to look a lot like Arizona—legally, at least. Over the past few years, the state has enacted a spate of anti-immigration laws; and whether it's State Senator Charlie Janssen's unconstitutional witch hunt against all brown people, an ordinance in Fremont that bars employers from hiring illegal immigrants and landlords from renting to them, or, the latest assault, a law that denies public assistance to legal immigrants who have lived in the country less than five years, it seems the legislature and governor have one thing on their minds: making Nebraska a less friendly, less tolerant state. In February, Governor Dave Heineman ordered the legislature to strip undocumented workers of pre-natal care, a move that drew sharp condemnation even from traditional Republican allies like Nebraska Right to Life . READ MORE

In the 1960s, the African-American unemployment rate in New York City was nearly identical to the white people unemployment rate. But by 1990, black people were well more than twice as likely to be unemployed as white people. Ever since, black unemployment has been the leading edge of unemployment trends; when unemployment shot up in 1992 to a New York City-wide average of 11%, unemployment among black men went to 17%. (Of course these are state Department of Labor numbers; they indicate people actually enrolled in the system, not the further mass of the jobless.) Let's take a look at the trending since the early 90s! READ MORE

Dear Everlast from House of Pain,

I'm sorry for calling you a "Leprechaun of Rage."

This was back in 1996, in a review I wrote for Vibe magazine of the third and last House of Pain album, Truth Crushed To Earth Shall Rise Again.

It was not a very nice thing to say, especially there where I put it, in the opening sentence. "Make way for the Leprechauns of Rage," I said. It was a reference to the Public Enemy song, "Prophets of Rage," of course. You guys being an Irish-American rap group, rather than black, like Public Enemy. Seems less clever to me now than it did at the time. But I guess that's the thing about getting older, huh?

I said lots of other not-so-nice things in the review, too. I did not think the album was very good. By way of comparison, it didn't "bang like shillelaghs," as I said the first two House of Pain albums did. (I'm not sure that could have ever sounded clever. But I did mean it; I really like those albums.) I criticized your lyrics, and the beats you used and went so far as to insinuate that the group's prior success might have been reliant on your former executive producer, Cyprus Hill's DJ Muggs. I think I threw in a couple more Irish jokes in at the end, too.

This was early in my career. I was a fact-checker at Vibe, and I'd just started writing record reviews. People liked pans, I'd noticed, and snide wit. Also, I'd grown up not-Irish in a heavily Irish town, amongst a heavily Irish circle of friends who liked to crack back-and-forth about matters of ethnicity. So when I was assigned to review an album from a rap group that had always been very vocal about its Irishness, and when I didn't like that album, I got my knives out. Overzealously.

Was there something even uglier going on? Did the glee I took in attacking your album have something to do with the fact that I was a white guy at a largely black magazine writing about a bunch of other white guys in hip-hop? Was I using the opportunity to take you down a peg as a way to earn some kind of stripes? I'd like to think not. Not consciously. But might there've been just a little bit of that slipping in there with those jokes, even as I didn't notice it? I wonder.

You read the review when it came out. I shouldn't have found that surprising, but I did-and strangely flattering, the thought of a rap star, someone I'd seen on MTV, sitting there reading what I written. But you didn't appreciate my criticisms, or, apparently, find my jokes very funny. I know all this because both your publicist at the time, and a friend of mine at the magazine who was friends with some of your friends, told me you had spoken about wanting to beat me up.

Coincidentally, your album, and my review of it, came out around the same time as the movie Swingers, with Vince Vaughn and John Favreau. As I'm sure you're aware, there's a scene in that movie where a friend of the protagonists shocks everybody by pulling out a gun during a shouting match with a bunch of white hip-hop heads. "Like fuckin' House of Pain was gonna do anything?" Vaughn says, admonishing him. (I can understand why you might have been extra cranky those days.)

According to reports from the friends of my friend, you were the type of guy who most certainly would have done something. So I'm grateful that your publicist fended off your requests that he bring you to a Vibe party and point me out. Seems likely I would have ended up picking my teeth out of a platter of vegetable spring rolls.

When the album flopped and House of Pain broke up, sometime in the next year, people around the office joked that it was like the famous review John Landau wrote in Rolling Stone that convinced Eric Clapton to disband Cream in 1968. I knew that was probably not the case in this instance, but the feeling I got from even just the idea pushed past flattering into something that made me uncomfortable. Things got worse soon thereafter, when news broke that you had suffered a coronary attack that almost killed you. You were unconscious in the hospital for three days, I learned, while surgeons replaced a valve in your heart. You were 29.

Thankfully, you are a resilient person. Not only did you recover quickly from the surgery, you switched directions musically, and scored a major hit with a jangly acoustic-rock tune, "What It's Like." Your solo album, Whitey Ford Sings The Blues, sold two million copies. A couple years later, you had that song with Santana on that album of his that sold like 25 million-"Put Your Lights On," you won Grammy for that one. I'm sure you're paid for forever. I'd imagine you don't often think about record reviews from 13 years ago.

But still, it was stupid, what I did. Not to criticize the album, but to do it so mean spiritedly. It was the mistake of a young writer feeling himself too much. And maybe not taking his job seriously enough, not understanding what it means to put something in print. So now, seriously, sorry.

• "It was Michael Jackson that brought blacks and whites and Asians and Latinos together." Al Sharpton, today, at Michael Jackson's public memorial. READ MORE

Today on the Internet: Asian Poses Dot Com is "the definitive guide to Asian poses." 1. It is run by a Chinese guy. 2. It is actually overly-researched to the point where something that seems racist and awkward actually begins to impress you with its internal logic? 3. Also still weird. [via]