If you listen to her music, you can decide for yourself, I think. But arguably Rihanna’s main talent isn’t music, as such, it’s being Rihanna and all that entails (of which singing/performing is part). She’s apparently the most marketable celebrity around right now: http://wwd.com/eye/people/rih….

Does that People piece gives the ages of everyone involved (even King Cairo, 3) to hammer home the point that these are a bunch of grown-ass people (Kylie Jenner, 18, and King Cairo, 3, excepted) acting like petty high schoolers?

And then he’s like, “Oh, looks like I have one of those foot things on the other side too. Interesting.”

You’re welcome. I hope it didn’t seem like I was ranting at you, I totally didn’t mean to. I was just so mindboggled that misinformation like that is floating around out there in the world, and I got a bit carried away.

Can I share a story, because your story has me all up in my feelings? So when slavery was abolished in the British Empire, slave owners in the Caribbean were paid compensation for the loss of their former property. It recently became possible to search these compensation records online, by searching for slave owners…

I am Barbadian and it is absolutely not true that Barbados “threw the planters off their plantations”. We still have plantations (some of which are still in active production) and many of them are still owned by rich white families, as in the US, in some cases the descendants of slave owners, as in the US, in some…

That’s amazing. To hold something like that in your hand. That’s amazing.

Were the Draytons of Drayton Hall descended from people who moved to the Carolinas from Barbados, do you know? I’m curious because Drayton is a common name in Barbados; I mean, obviously it’s of British origin, but there are well-documented Barbados-Carolinas connection, so I was wondering if this was one of them.

From the article:

When I saw that this series was starting at The Guardian, it reminded me of a BBC News piece I read recently about Robert Jones, a New Orleans man who was wrongfully convicted and served 23 years (of a life sentence) in prison for crimes that not only was he innocent of committing, but that someone else had already…

I remember this video because it’s the one where she randomly, and uninvited, sticks her hand in Richard Ayoade’s hair while talking about how women shouldn’t get rid of their pubic hair; just a bad move on her part.

I had a similar thought, but then it occurred to me that calling the kids Korean might be to describe their nationality rather than their ethnicity, i.e. to try to highlight that they had been, essentially, trafficked internationally by this woman.

In that last photo, she has the best dress by far, and she knows it.

If she wanted to celebrate the diversity of beauty or whatever, why is she putting her white self in every picture?

It’s interesting that Madonna describes Rocco’s attitude towards her career as him not being “satisfied” (as opposed to him not being, say, impressed). Like, do kids that age generally have strong attitudes of satisfaction or dissatisfaction towards their parents’ careers and accomplishments? I feel like the phrasing…

Oh, absolutely no offence taken!

It makes me cringe a little when people talk about “a Caribbean accent” as if there’s some singular Caribbean accent (although I’m not saying that’s what you, personally, meant to suggest), because there’s such a variation in accents from country to country (although there are some that resemble each other). Like, the…

No-one has said that them being attractive Asian girls says “sex workers” or is a reason to think they were “hookers”. It’s possible that the officials thought that they were victims of human trafficking, which is not the same as being a sex worker. Apart from that, if they didn’t have the appropriate visas (which thei…

Yeah, I know that there have been cases where I’ve passed through immigration, but whatever the officer* scribbled on my form was clearly an instruction to the Customs people to screen me more thoroughly than usual. I figure that’s how it worked in this case too.

Even from some (most, I would think) Commonwealth countries, you need the appropriate visa paperwork. I strongly dislike going through US Immigration and Customs, and even so I don’t find myself inclined (on the basis of what I’ve read about the situation) to blame the US authorities in this case, especially if they…