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MMLP2 Album Cover Released

In true Shady style, Eminem and his marketing team released the image of the MMLP2 album cover via Twitter on Friday. It's an amazing pubic relations experiment 14 months in the making.

The artwork debuted shortly after Mr. Mathers asked his followers one trivia question:



Shady Shows Us What "Berzerk" Really Means

It's been a crazy couple of days for The Real Slim Shady. First, the rapper appeared on ESPN in character to gave an amazing interview during half-time of the Michigan-Notre Dame football game Saturday night.


Can Feminist Women Love Eminem? Absolutely.

Do women love Eminem? Absolutely. In fact, they love Slim Shady's new song "Berzerk" so much they helped it debut on this week's Billboard "Hot 100" charts in the No. 2 spot among all digital songs.


How To Flip It With Glass

Here is a recap of my remarks #throughglass at the USC Annenberg Journalism School Director's Forum: Fun, Learning, Interaction, Presentation.



Back To The Future with Eminem’s “Berzerk”

Guess Who’s REALLY Back? Last night during the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards, the network aired a trailer for Eminem’s long-awaited eighth studio album MMLP2 (The Marshall Mathers LP 2), and now the king of hip hop has released the newest single, “Berzerk,” which samples Billy Squier's hit 1981 song "The Stroke."


What the 'Mixed Kids Are Always So Beautiful' Meme Really Means

Also published at Huffington Post

The New York Times' Motherlode blog recently posted a thought-provoking article called, "Mixed Kids Are Always So Beautiful." The author's experiences as a parent to a racially-ambiguous mixed child are proof that beauty and race are concepts societies create that may not actually exist in nature. As a result, beauty and race are associated with and impacted by our experiences and perceptions related to class, immigration, gender, sexuality and marketing. Case in point: Since the Time magazine "New Eve" cover in the 1990s, multiracial individuals are more and more said to be the face of 21st century America and its evolved standard of beauty. But what's less known is that even this image was altered to look less "Hispanic/Latino" (read: brown) and more "European" (read: white) after focus group testing.



New Laureate Is More than the Sum of Her Parts

...full text also found on The Huffington Post and The Root

Recently released reports by the Pew Center and the US Census Bureau indicate that intermarriage across racial and ethnic lines and an increasing non-white demographic continue to be on the rise in the U.S. Given this month’s focus on Loving Day and its impact on multiracial ancestries we can certainly take this news as cause for celebration and a reason to continue the fight for marriage equality everywhere. And, as I argue in my book Clearly Invisible: Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity, we should remember that an accurate historical account of interracial sex and marriage in the U.S. should focus as much on what is now revealed as it does on what has always been concealed.


Is the Tanning of America Only Skin Deep?

...full text also found on The Huffington Post

It’s official: The United States is “tan.”

According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s first population estimate by age, race, ethnicity, and sex since the 2010 Census, “50.4 percent of our nation's population younger than age 1 were minorities as of July 1, 2011. This is up from 49.5 percent from the 2010 Census taken April 1, 2010. The population younger than age 5 was 49.7 percent minority in 2011, up from 49.0 percent in 2010.”



Who Passes Into The Hunger Games' Future?

...full text also found on The Huffington Post

The Hunger Games, dubbed the "racial games" by some cultural commentators, takes place in the dystopian nation-state called Panem. And, as recent controversy suggests, it also takes place in our minds.


The L.A. Uprising’s 20th Anniversary and the Resurrection of Tupac Shakur

...full text also available at Truthdig

Sunday, April 29 marks the 20th anniversary of the start of the Los Angeles uprising and the two week anniversary of the resurrection of slain gangsta rapper Tupac Shakur as a hologram at Coachella. The events are not a coincidence.