Jonathan Smith

There's nothing like showing up 2,000 miles from home for your first day of boarding school and having a rich white kid from Beverly Hills tell you you're not black enough. If you're a black kid from a white suburb, you get that a lot. It's the kind…

The CW has always been a network about teen power. Once dedicated to celebrating the lives of the 1% with shows like Gossip Girl and the revamped 90210, the network has refocused its brand on the lives of the supernatural with shows like The Vampire…

Anybody who's read a sci-fi novel or seen a sci-fi flick has dreamt of teleportation, hover biking, or immortality. Few people know how close science is coming to achieving those dreams. Sci-fi films seem to be experiencing a resurgence. Marvel…

Sean "Diddy" Combs recently launched his new business venture, Revolt, a cable music network that joins a long list of businesses who've hijacked terms like revolt, revolution, or rebel to appear relevant to hipsters' countercultural tendencies.…

I looked at the cast list for Ridley Scott's Moses biopic, Exodus, and found myself experiencing a conundrum. While I'm a huge fan of the actors that have been cast, I'm upset and perplexed by Mr. Scott's choices. This is because the film's director…

Russell Brand found himself at the center of yet another controversy a couple of weeks ago when he was honored at a GQ award ceremony in London. While receiving the Oracle Award, he unleashed criticism of the event's sponsor, Hugo Boss, for their…

Sleepy Hollow is a fantasy police procedural from Fox that combines the grit of a detective series with a world filled with witches, demons, secret societies, time travel, and American history. It's the latest the channel's long line of supernatural…

Follow @policymic Note: This story contains some graphic language. America’s profitable porn industry came to a grinding halt (sorry, I couldn’t resist) last week. Several industry organizations called for a moratorium on production after a 29…

The word noble comes to us from the Latin word, nobilis, which roughly translates to well-known. In Ancient Rome, patricians (the nobility) competed amongst themselves to enlarge their dignitas and auctoritas through tales of their military exploits…

I didn’t know what to expect as I stepped past the rope line into the dimly lit lounge. Drenched in sweat from my swim through the evening’s humidity, I immediately headed towards the Gatsby-esque bar to order a drink. As I sat sipping on whiskey…

A running joke between my friends and me during my high school and college years was that I suffered from “yellow fever.” The phrase is racist, even in jest, as it associates dating Asians with a disease and I started to notice the word choice my…

As a son of the South (born and raised in Houston, Texas and both my parents are from Virginia), I didn’t find Paula Deen’s casual relationship with the “N” word as shocking as my Northern friends did. Oddly enough, reading the leaked deposition…

My first apartment in NYC was a 2-bedroom that my roommates and I converted into a 4 bedroom on St. Marks and Avenue A. For an apartment that could fit in my parents’ living room back in Texas, three of us paid 1,100 bucks a month while the 4th…

A few weeks ago, my friends and I paid for overpriced tickets to a movie I paid for once before. Twenty years after its theatrical release, Jurassic Park was back in theaters in 3D. Our reasons for going were mostly sentimental. The majority of us…

Hollywood has played a part in the progressive shift in attitudes towards homosexuality in our society. According to a survey authored by Ipsos MediaCT, "18% of television viewers aged 13-64 say that TV in general has changed their opinion of…

People have been analyzing the popularity of rap music in white suburbia ever since Yo MTV Raps started scaring parents in the late 80s and early 90s. I've always considered such an analysis to be motivated by fear of "black" America or another…

Hollywood has played a part in the progressive shift in attitudes towards homosexuality in our society. According to a survey authored by Ipsos MediaCT, "18% of television viewers aged 13-64 say that TV in general has changed their opinion of…