Gilbert Arenas's Unfunny Business

Publishers Weekly, the leading trade publication for the American book industry, is not a magazine that comes to mind when you think "racial drama." A magazine of its ilk doesn't have much reason to push the envelope. But PW made headlines this week for an edgy cover image that some folks have labeled as being racially insensitive. What do you think?

The Tiger Woods scandal is just one more example of how the media use irrelevant gossip and slanted opinion to distract us from what really matters.

The elevation of Black dysfunction and the invisibility of positive Black images are sending destructive messages about the reality of Black life, both to our young people and to those outside the Black community.

Before I begin, I want to make sure that you all know I am 100 percent against what Kanye West did at MTV's Video Music Awards last week. Storming the stage during Taylor Swift's victory speech to rebuke the audience for not selecting Beyonce -- and, in effect, for selecting Taylor Swift -- was not cool.

But, like many people who watched that painful drama unfold on the air and then on Twitter and Facebook in the minutes that followed, I felt there had to be more to the story than just an intoxicated rapper making a scene on national TV.

Putting BET's Business in the Street
Andreas Hale, former Executive Editor of Music for BET.com, got the pink slip this week and tried to take the company down with him. After nearly a year at the urban entertainment network, the executive left his post by sending a fiery email to industry friends confirming what many critics of the network have long suspected: BET is a hot mess.

If the stories in this edition of Pop & Circumstance have a common theme, it's the call for audiences -- viewers, listeners, and users of media -- to exercise more compassion, discernment, and responsibility in the way they interact with pop culture. Come to think of it, those are themes found in many editions of P&C. Anyway, we talk about them more explicitly this time around. So let's get started.

Every now and then a week comes along in pop culture that leaves us feeling entertained, inspired, and hopeful. And then there are those weeks that leave us completely befuddled, scratching our heads in confusion while mumbling, "What is this world coming to?" Last week was one of those weeks. Here is a sample of some of the pop culture questions that left us stumped.

Forty years ago this week, more than 400,000 concertgoers gathered on the muddy grounds of a 600-acre dairy farm in upstate New York to celebrate what was billed as "three days of peace and music." The Woodstock Music & Art Fair transformed the way we think about popular music and youth culture. In fact, it became an emblem of the counterculture movement of the 1960s.

This week's Pop & Circumstance is all about returns -- the return of a compelling show, the return of an iconic magazine, the (surprising) return of a reality-show diva, and the return of BET's fishy programming.

Here's this week's rundown of pop-culture stories. Lots to talk about, so let's get started.