The two slaves, a father and daughter, were stripped to the waist and positioned for frontal and side views. Then, like subjects in contemporary mug shots, their pictures were taken, as part of a racist study arguing that black people were an inferior race.

Almost 170 years later, they are at the center of a dispute over who should own the fruits of American slavery.

The images of the father and daughter, identified by their first names, Renty and Delia, were commissioned by a professor at Harvard and are now stored in a museum on campus as precious cultural artifacts.

But to the Lanier family, they are records of her personal family history. “These were our bedtime stories,” Shonrael Lanier said.

Calvin Klein’s former lover, Nicholas Gruber, 28, was arrested last week (15 March) for the alleged assault of a man with a frying pan.

A friend of Gruber’s, Brandon Steele, 26 reportedly aided the ex-gay porn star.

Police said the pair attacked an unnamed man following a dispute over money at Steele’s New York City apartment.

The pair have been charged with second-degree assault and unlawful imprisonment in the first degree.

Why do many working-class white Americans support politicians whose policies are literally killing them?

This is the question sociologist and psychiatrist Jonathan Metzl tries to answer in his new book, Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland. The book is a serious look at how cultural attitudes associated with “whiteness” encourage white people to adopt political views — like opposition to gun laws or the Affordable Care Act — that undercut their own health.

The book is not about racism at the individual level, though you can certainly read that into it. For Metzl, the key question is how did a politics of racial resentment become so powerful that it overwhelmed even the basic instinct for self-preservation? To get answers, he spent years talking to voters in Southern and Midwestern states, asking them to explain their political choices. The answers aren’t terribly satisfying, but they are instructive.

I spoke to Metzl about what he learned and what he thinks we can do to solve this problem. A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Michael Jackson's sales, streaming numbers, and radio airplay have all dipped in the wake of the two-part documentary Leaving Neverland.

According to Billboard, Jackson's combined album and song sales dropped by 5 percent after the Neverland premiere. His album sales alone dropped by 39 percent. Jackson's on-demand streams fell from 19.7 million to 18.7 million.

Emphasizing that the resources available to preserve Hollywood’s film history are “woefully inadequate,” Jane Fonda urged the Hollywood community to “invest as much in saving [films] as making them."

That was the call to action at the The Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) Film Restoration Summit, which the HFPA presented in partnership with The Film Foundation and Institut Lumière, Saturday at the Theatre at Ace Hotel in downtown Los Angeles.

"More than 50 percent of films made before 1950 are lost to us forever," HFPA president Meher Tatna warned, explaining that the HFPA's commitment to preserving cinema history through support of film restoration is one of its most important initiatives. She added that the HFPA’s “decades long” support of this mission has already seen more than $6.5 million invested in 125 film restoration projects.

Fonda noted that this isn't just about preserving Hollywood classics, but also newsreels and documentary material. "Films were made because filmmakers wanted to make sure what happened would never be forgotten," she said. "If we allow documents of our past to disappear we end up [without the whole picture]. We can't know where we are going if we don't know where we have been."

Michael Jackson is now deceased and consequently he will never be convicted in a court of law, but many of Jackson’s alleged behaviors were typical of those exhibited by child sexual offenders who use grooming behaviors. Grooming behaviors are the behaviors and techniques a sexual offender employs so that they can engage in abuse without detection. Grooming behaviors are directed toward the intended victim, the child’s parents or guardians and the community at large. They generally follow a series of stages that may include selecting a vulnerable victim, gaining access to the child, developing trust of the child and their guardians, and desensitizing the child to sexual touch so the abuse can take place without detection. However, many of these grooming behaviors also overlap with behaviors that caring, involved adults engage in and thus it is often hard for adults to recognize them before abuse takes place.

The following behaviors could be potential indications of grooming.

In conversation with one of his friends, the openly gay Dr. William Hirsch, Fred Rogers himself concluded that if sexuality was measured on a scale of one to ten: “Well, you know, I must be right smack in the middle. Because I have found women attractive and I have found men attractive.”

An estimated 4.5 percent of U.S. adults identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, and they tend to be younger and poorer than the population at large, according to an analysis of polling data released on Tuesday.

The Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law examined previously released results from the Gallup Daily Tracking survey and went deeper into the data, enabling a more detailed demographic picture of the adult U.S. LGBTQ population of roughly 11.3 million people.

The institute found Washington, D.C., had the highest percentage of LGBTQ people at 9.8 percent and North Dakota had the lowest at 2.7 percent.

When Amanda Robson’s husband, Wade, first told her that he had suffered years of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of Michael Jackson, she grew worried for the safety of their son. “Is there any confusion as to what is appropriate in how you love [him]?” she says she asked Wade, in the HBO documentary Leaving Neverland.

Her concern, that as an alleged victim of molestation her husband may have been a threat that spread that evil to another generation, reflects a view so embedded in the culture that it rarely merits much discussion. But the “cycle of abuse,” as it’s often understood, is nothing less than psychological Lysenkoism: the belief, in the absence of clear, empirical evidence, that lived abuse tends to propagate across generations and reproduce itself in specific ways. The facts about the “intergenerational transmission of maltreatment,” as scholars call it, are very complicated, and while there’s some truth to the idea as it’s generally portrayed, there’s also a fair amount of falsehood.

Three of the contemporary art world's leading light talk about Africa and art.

Desi Arnaz was a Cuban-born American actor, musician, and TV producer. He is best known for his role as Ricky Ricardo in the cult classic American TV sitcom I Love Lucy. Co-starring alongside his then-wife Lucille Ball, the pair are credited as the inventors of the syndicated rerun as they were more than just actors in the show – they were key in making it into such a success. The show ran from 1951-1957 and spanned six seasons with 180 half-hour episodes in total, which was previously unheard of for a TV show.

Arnaz became part of one of the USA’s most watched shows, but his life wasn’t always glitz and glam, even if it might have seemed that way in the beginning. Born into a prominent Cuban family in Santiago in 1917, Arnaz’s father, Desiderio Arnaz II, was mayor of Santiago, the original capital of Cuba. His mother, Dolores de Acha, was the daughter of one of the founders of the Bacardi Rum Company. If that wasn’t enough of a claim to fame, Arnaz’s grandfather, Don Desiderio, was a physician who accompanied Theodore Roosevelt and the Rough Riders at the Battle of San Juan Hill in 1898.

On Tuesday, ex-president Barack Obama and Stephen Curry combined their powers for a town hall event that urged youngsters from minority backgrounds to develop confidence without feeling compelled to build self-worth based on chasing women and money.

The event unfolded in Oakland, and it also marked the fifth anniversary of Obama's My Brother’s Keeper Alliance. Both Curry and the former president talked about challenges they faced in their formative years, while also speaking about broader ranging topics, such as hip-hop, policing in minority communities, discipline in schools, male role models, and manhood.

Obama addressed societal pressures that young people face to act a certain way because of hip hop's frequent portrayal of what it means to be successful. The President's remarks on that subject were described as one of the event's "more humorous moments," as he blended making his point with some shade.

"We live in a culture where our worth is measured by how much money we have and how famous we are," Obama said to the capacity crowd made up of youth flown to the Bay from throughout the country. "I will tell you, at the end of the day, the thing that will give you confidence is not that. I know a lot of rich people that are all messed up."

An all-time classic is making its way back to the big screen.

80 years after its initial release in 1939, Gone with the Wind will screen at participating locations for two days only this year. Fans of the Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh classic can watch the movie at the end of this month on Thursday Feb. 28 and Saturday March 3.

Though the movie remains a classic, modern audiences have received it with mixed views due to its representation of black people. It was most recently pulled from an annual summer movie festival in Memphis after attendees complained about its racial insensitivity.

I always thought Voodoo, was bad, satanic and evil. Society’s perception of voodoo rites and rituals have been distorted by Europeans to only place focus on the evil or malicious side of things. There are healing spells, nature spells, love spells, purification spells, joyous celebration spells. Spirits may be invoked to bring harmony and peace, birth and rebirth, increase the abundance of luck, material happiness, and renewed health. The fact is, for those who believe it, voodoo is powerful. It is also empowering to the person who practices it.

Voodoo is one of the world’s oldest religions, it has been purposely characterized as barbaric, primitive, sexually licentious practice based on superstition and spectacle. Much of this image, however, is due to a concerted effort by Europeans, who have a massive fear of any and EVERY thing African, to suppress and distort a legitimate and unique religion that flourished among their enslaved Africans. When slavers brought these peoples across the ocean to the Americas, the African’s brought their religion with them.

Yet upon researching, I’ve discovered that it’s not evil at all. Sure you can do some pretty nasty things to those who piss you off, but “Voodoo (Vodun) is a derivative of the world’s oldest known religions which have been around in Africa since the beginning of human civilization. Some conservative estimates these civilizations and religions to be over 10,000 years old.” Ironically, it was the enforced immigration of enslaved Africans from different ethnic groups that provided the circumstances for the development of Voodoo.

European colonists thought that by desolating the ethnic groups, these could not come together as a community. However, in the misery of slavery, the transplanted Africans found in their faith a common thread. They began to invoke not only their own Gods but to practice rites other than their own. In this process, they comingled and modified rituals of various ethnic groups.

Several weeks ago I was in a North Side coffeehouse, trying to ignore the usual hodgepodge of music blaring from the speakers, when a rap song came on.

It made me stop and listen. Over and over, it used the racial epithet we euphemistically call “the N-word,” and with each repetition I felt more bothered.

Was this OK? For this racially charged word to be so cavalierly broadcast into this public space? A space occupied entirely by white people? If there had been any black people there, would it have been better? Or worse? Was it OK because the word was being used by a black person?

I stewed over those questions for the time it took to finish my coffee, then on my way out stopped by the counter. I told the barista I thought it was wrong to casually blast that word in here, to treat it, in this space, as background entertainment. He shrugged.