The Black Album

Jay-Z gives an excellent interview over at NPR.  The excerpt from his book is also worth reading; I don’t generally go in for memoirs (except of Cuban childhoods — trying to decode my mother’s foreign youth and all that), but this one seems promising (and not entirely ghostwritten).  His take on what it is to be poor in America is, from my own experience, spot-on, and I’m curious to read more of it.

Conversely, this old Joan Didion review takes on the case of overprivilege, particularly as manifested by one Mr. Woody Allen.  I’ll be honest: I’ve never been a big fan of Woody Allen’s movies, or his work in general — there’s a smugness to his neuroticism that I find very off-putting, and it’s that same sensibility that Didion is reacting to in the above essay.