Culture

Houston's a huge town with a wealth of cultural events on any given weekend. Each Thursday, Chron helps you narrow it down with a selection of some of the coolest, most unique activities, from family-friendly festivals to free performances to art openings and more. Now that the sun has set on another Rodeo, Houston is gearing up for the next major event that will bring thousands to the city and draw huge crowds to NRG stadium: the NCAA men's basketball tournament, whose Final Four games will be played at the south side arena on April 1 and 3. All of which makes this coming weekend in Houston seem like the eye of the storm. But there's still plenty to do around town before March Madness spills into early April—especially if your taste in pastimes extends to art, theater, and headbanging. Below, we've singled out six local events worth attending. … [Read more...] about 6 cool events happening in Houston this weekend

FEW aspects of the American past have inspired more colorful mythology than the Underground Railroad. It’s probably fair to say that most Americans view it as a thrilling tapestry of midnight flights, hairbreadth escapes, mysterious codes and strange hiding places. So it’s not surprising that the intriguing (if only recently invented) tale of escape maps encoded in antebellum quilts — enshrined in a metastasizing library of children’s books and teachers’ lesson plans and perhaps even in a Central Park memorial to Frederick Douglass — should also seize the popular imagination. But faked history serves no one, especially when it buries important truths that have been hidden far too long. The “freedom quilt” myth is just the newest acquisition in a congeries of bogus, often bizarre, legends attached to the Underground Railroad. Despite a lack of documentation, tales of actual tunnels through which fugitives supposedly fled persist in communities from the Canadian border to the … [Read more...] about History’s Tangled Threads

Do we need yet another book on Lincoln, especially in the wake of all the Lincoln volumes that appeared last year in commemoration of the 200th anniversary of his birth? Well, yes, we do — if the book is by so richly informed a commentator as Eric Foner, the DeWitt Clinton professor of history at Columbia. Foner tackles what would seem to be an obvious topic, Lincoln and slavery, and manages to cast new light on it. Foner has long been deliberating about Lincoln. He is, most recently, the editor of a collection of essays, “Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World,” and among his previous books are a seminal one on the rise of the Republican Party, “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men,” and another, “Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877,” in which Lincoln’s fledgling policies toward the defeated South were revised in the decade just after the Civil War. Having probed the politics of the Civil War era, Foner is in a strong position to offer what … [Read more...] about Learning to Be Lincoln

Jarret Willis, a Black real estate agent at a luxury brokerage in the Hamptons, said his co-workers called him Jafar — a comparison to the brown-skinned, villainous sorcerer from “Aladdin.” Managers routinely lobbed racial epithets around the office, according to a lawsuit filed on Tuesday in New York State Supreme Court by Harlan Goldberg, who is white and who worked with Mr. Willis at the brokerage. Mr. Goldberg is suing their former brokerage, Bespoke Real Estate, for wrongful termination, unpaid commission and punitive damages. He claims he was fired in part for his objections to Mr. Willis’s treatment by the co-founders of the company, the brothers Cody and Zachary Vichinsky. His lawsuit follows complaints that Mr. Willis filed in February with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and New York State Division of Human Rights. Mr. Goldberg and Mr. Willis plan to jointly file a separate suit that will focus more on the claims of discrimination, according to their … [Read more...] about Two Real Estate Agents Say Racism Was Part of the Culture at Brokerage

One of the saddest architectural sights on the blocks near San Francisco’s Civic Center is the backside of 1455 Market Street . The ground floor is coated in speckled beige concrete that looks as if it was patterned by pushing giant egg cartons into wet cement. The walls above are the same concrete, but here the facade shifts to a ribbed corduroy finish that’s not necessarily an improvement. The stubby, 16-story tower atop the five-story base has a certain blunt rigor. The scene along Market Street does its best to be inviting, no easy task within two blocks of misery-filled United Nations Plaza. Overall, though, it’s hard to imagine why anyone would want to work here — and no surprise that the tech firms that briefly made this a coveted address have packed or are packing their bags. Once again in San Francisco, as in all cities, the underlying power of place is reasserting itself. Or to put it in real estate terms: location, location, location. I visited 1455 Market … [Read more...] about From tech hub to empty husk: How S.F. building shows city’s latest cycle of boom to bust

This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate 3 GENEVA (AP) — Created to help protect athletes after the USA Gymnastics sexual abuse scandal, the sport’s international investigations agency has set new safeguarding standards with a view to the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. The Gymnastics Ethics Foundation published a “Gymnasts 2028” strategy Thursday to better protect athletes from harassment and abuse, investigate complaints, prosecute disciplinary cases and monitor national federations. “The idea is to really put gymnasts at the center of our thinking throughout everything we do,” Alex McLin, the independent foundation’s director, told The Associated Press in an interview. The GEF was created and funded by the sport’s governing body, the International Gymnastics Federation, in the fallout from the scandal of long-time U.S. team doctor Larry Nassar, who is now in prison. Since 2019, the foundation has worked to address … [Read more...] about Ethics agency to better protect gymnasts for LA Olympics