Kat Chow

Emily Johnson Dickerson died at her home in Ada, Okla., last week. She was the last person alive who spoke only the Chickasaw language.

"This is a sad day for all Chickasaw people because we have lost a cherished member of our Chickasaw family and an unequaled source of knowledge ...

About a month ago, I asked my followers on Twitter if they had any recommendations for a comic artist whose work I should check out. Person after person brought up Yumi Sakugawa, a California-based artist. And I was familiar with her work: she's the brains behind the ever-nostalgic strip, ...

One of the stories of 2013 was that every time a movie with people of color in prominent roles got giant ratings, people were shocked. You could almost set your watch to this phenomenon, which Linda Holmes once memorably described as "fluke-ifying."

When the Spanish-language movie Instructions Not ...

Melissa Harris-Perry, host of an MSNBC weekend show, apologized on Tuesday for comments she and her panelists recently made. On Sunday, Harris-Perry had her guests — a group of comedians — caption a photo of Mitt Romney's family, which included Romney's adopted grandchild.

"And of course, there on ...

Cow-d it really be? Have our ears herd this correctly? (Sorry, I can't help myself.)

Patrick Stewart — ahem, Sir Patrick Stewart — mooed up a storm on the podcast How To Do Everything, impersonating cows from various regions. You might even say Stewart was code-switching.

A listener ...

Word has hit the Internet streets that Saturday Night Live recently hosted special — some folks are saying "secret!" — auditions for black women to add to its cast.

Things are moving fast: Bill Carter of The New York Times reports that Lorne Michaels, SNL creator and executive producer, said ...

Telemundo recently announced that its telenovela El Señor de los Cielos (Lord of the Skies) will be back for a second season; production began this week in Mexico City. This resurrection sets it apart from almost every other telenovela because, unlike American soap operas, telenovelas have a clear beginning and ...

"No tear gas made here." That's the battle cry emblazoned on a banner outside the factory of Huy Fong Foods in Irwindale, Calif. Last week, a judge ordered the maker of the popular hot sauce Sriracha to halt any work that produces irritating fumes. Neighbors had previously complained to ...

Researchers recently took data from the Facebook app Are You Interested and found that not only is race a factor in our online dating interests, but particular races get disproportionately high — and low — amounts of interest.

Of the 2.4 million heterosexual interactions researchers reviewed, the findings show:

...

Catherine Chung went from mathematics to writing, though she says words were always her first love. She was named one of Granta's New Voices in 2010, and her first novel, Forgotten Country, received honorable mention for a PEN/Hemingway Award last year.

In Forgotten Country, Chung writes of a family with ...

Halloween is — uh, how do you say? — high season for writing about race and culture. The list of celebrities, stores and college freshmen sporting racist costumes — plus the inevitable backlash — means these stories practically write themselves.

Given the yearly onslaught of racist Halloween costumes, ...

In August, we asked folks to share stories from moments when they've been the odd person out, the only one of their kind. We wanted to hear the uproariously funny and poignant stories that stuck in people's memories. And many of the memories that were shared came from the classroom. ...

The revered Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, 72, announced this weekend at the Venice Film Festival that he's retiring from making full-length feature films. (He previously went into "semi-retirement" after directing Princess Mononoke in 1997.)

Hearing the news reminded me that My Neighbor Totoro (1988) was the very first film I ...

We started our historical Twitter account, @TodayIn1963, in June with the idea that we wanted to bring this monumental summer back to life with a modern take.

NPR librarian JoElla Stralley, Code Switch's Matt Thompson and I combed through primary sources and archived newspaper articles to replicate the ...

There are lots of questions for high school grads: Should you go for an associate degree or a bachelor's? A community college or a four-year university? Does it really matter where you go? If we're comparing top-tier schools with open-access ones, then yes. It matters a whole lot, and it ...

Earlier this week, the Code Switch team got a note from a publicist named Hector Andres Silva who said he had some news to share.

Silva was ditching his nickname, "Andy," which he'd been using for two decades. Silva grew up in South America (his parents are Mexican and Colombian) ...

After seeing the animated movie Turbo, Code Switch's Karen Grigsby Bates and Kat Chow reflect on the movie's attempt at showing diversity.

DreamWorks Animation's movie, Turbo, hit theaters earlier this week. Touted for its multicultural cast, the movie follows a young garden snail named Theo, who dreams of ...

It's a predictable pattern: Tragedy strikes, and the volume of racism gets loud on the Internet. After Asiana Airlines Flight 214 crash-landed in San Francisco last weekend, leaving two dead and many others injured, some folks thought it was appropriate to resurrect the dated trope that Asians are bad drivers. ...

NPR Music has launched a stream of songs inspired by the civil rights movement, sending the pulse of an era back into our everyday.

All summer long, we've been unearthing the legacy of that time 50 years ago: Michele Norris looked at a daughter's struggle to overcome ...

NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health recently polled 1,081 African-Americans about their lives. One of the areas respondents were asked about was their perceptions of their financial status.

As Code Switch's Gene Demby reported in an earlier post, the effects ...