Maybe what I am about to say will come as a surprise to some. But it's something I've known about myself for years.

I have a hard time networking with white guys. And I think they have a hard time networking with me, too.

I’m not saying I don’t have any white male friends—I do. But within my social network, the ratio of white men to any other group is disproportionately small.

I’m so bad at networking with white guys that even the most serendipitous circumstances are foiled. I once had an interview with a Boston-based founder of a certain “game layer on top of the world.” I [...]

In case you haven't seen it yet, here is the new Vampire Weekend video. It's pretty great for lots of reasons: RZA as Shaolin ninja/chair umpire, Jake Gyllenhaal as drunk, Lil Jon speaking French, the racially symbolic all-white set. Also, people playing tennis in motorcycle helmets and singer Ezra Koenig looking a lot like Michael Cera.

To anyone paying attention, it wasn’t really a surprise when blacks didn’t come out in droves to support Occupy Wall Street. Despite the fact that blacks suffer from poverty and the ills accompanying it at wildly disproportionate rates, African-Americans have for a number of uncertain reasons been avoiding most of the liberal demonstrations of the moment. Blacks don't occupy Wall Street (or Denver or San Francisco) just as blacks don’t SlutWalk, or rally at the World Bank.

What was surprising was when the rappers started showing up.

At first it was just Russell Simmons—not technically a rapper, but a rap icon—his proselytizing becoming a daily fixture [...]

Every year for the past 55 years during the week leading up to the Kentucky Derby, Louisville has hosted one of the nation’s largest parades, the Pegasus Parade. Every year but one. In 1967, the parade and all the other traditional “Derby Week” events were cancelled. That year, instead of the usual festival and fanfare, tension was in the air. Civil rights protests and counter-protests had brought the city to the brink of full unrest. As race day approached, Louisville's mayor asked the governor to call in the National Guard to help police Churchill Downs. The Ku Klux Klan had announced they would also be in attendance at the [...]