What to hate Instead of Zoe Saldana casting: Parlour magazine's Shannon Washington says that the decision to cast Zoe Saldana as Nina Simone in a forthcoming biopic was misguided, but critics should get over being upset about it. Instead, she says, "We have to literally put our money where our mouths are by supporting the content creators, studios and film festivals that tell the authentic narratives of our lives."
Supreme Court to rule on voting-rights law: The Supreme Court agreed on Friday to rule on a challenge to Congress' power to protect minority groups' rights at the polls, SCOTUS Blog reports. The court said it would hear claims that Congress went beyond its authority when it extended for another 25 years the nation's most important civil rights law, the Voting Rights Act, originally passed in 1965 and renewed four times since then.
Rihanna and Brown release love duet: The singer has tweeted that her new album will include a duet with Brown, called — of all things — "Nobody's Business," an upbeat love song.
Diverse Issues in Higher Education Profiles Henry Louis Gates Jr.: Discussing his PBS miniseries on African-American genealogy, The Root's editor-in-chief says, "I think it will revolutionize our understanding of American history and also our concept of race when we realize there is no purity. From the beginning of human civilization, no matter what the conventions or the law was, and sometimes as a result of rape and sometimes as a result of choice, people had mixed offspring, and we are the product of those complicated sets of causes."