links for 2010-03-31

"Opponents of smoking, seven former secretaries of health and many members of Congress argued for an outright ban of menthol in the tobacco law last year. They said that the flavoring, which cools and masks the harsh taste of cigarettes, was used as a lure for young smokers while also being marketed to black smokers, who have the highest rates of smoking-related disease."

"This C-Span caller is upset with how many black people keep calling into C-Span. But he has a helpful suggestion: "you should change your name from C-Span to black-span." The C-Span call-in host guy has a terrible job."

"The story ran on the website of the New York-based hipster magazine Vice.

Entitled “Arctic Teenagers,” it’s basically a second-hand retelling of one girl’s experiences growing up here.

“What if it was -50C outside, booze and drugs are almost triple what they are in the rest of the country, and a bunch of your friends committed suicide because they got dumped?” the story reads. “That’s Nunavut teenhood, in a frozen and depressing nutshell.”

The video rocks- Go Spellman!. "Historically black liberal arts college for women in Atlanta competes strongly in RoboCup, the Olympics of robotics and artificial intelligence."

'Treva: Touching on that I'm trying to think of a culture in which women really do get a good wrap. [How] Hip-Hop treats women is not extraordinarily different from how we treat women in the world. Hip-Hop is in response to a culture where we're talking about one in four women being raped in their lifetime, if that's not a misogynistic culture then I don't know what is. We're talking about a culture where one in 12 men will rape a woman, if that's not misogyny, I don't know what is. 72 cents on the dollar is what women make for every dollar that a man makes."