Mainstream

There was a sharp contrast between the two headlining performances at this year's Preakness InfieldFest. Frugal rapper Macklemore, an independent artist with two No. 1 hit singles to his name, won the crowd over Saturday with messages that were positive, compassionate and sometimes just silly. Pitbull, the stoic purveyor of Eurodance-inspired rap-meets-pop, bludgeoned the crowd with rib-cage-shaking bass. And though Macklemore performed to a dry crowd while Pitbull fought through the rain, the results were largely the same, with an approving crowd fist-pumping and dancing.

When the Rev. Melvin C. Green was installed formally as pastor of Christian Community Church of God on Sunday, he was presented with two ministerial robes trimmed with African kente cloth.Also on Sunday, to mark the Rev. Vashti McKenzie's fifth anniversary as pastor of Payne Memorial AME Church, her congregation gave her a light blue robe of silk edged in an African-style gold embroidery.These ministers -- of different sexes and denominations -- show how the revolution in clergy dress in the black church has become mainstream in recent years.

On April 25, theU.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission(EEOC), for the first time in 25 years, updated its guidance on how employers may use criminal background checks in the hiring process. The new guidelines reaffirm that it is illegal under the Civil Rights Act for companies to exclude people from employment based on arrest or conviction records - unless the offense is directly related to the job at hand. The need for EEOC action was dire. More than 1 in 4 Americans - 65 million people - have an arrest or conviction record, leaving a significant segment of the population largely shut out of the job market.

ON HIS DEATHBED, he received 100 telephone calls per hour. More operators had to be hired to handle the load. "We've never had this number of calls, even when Lucille Ball was here, Kirk Douglas or George Burns," said Paula Correia, spokeswoman for Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. "Never anything like this, ever."One person who visited the dying man said: "It's a real shame. I went to the hospital and saw him, but he was unconscious. He didn't even know I was in the room. It wasn't a pretty sight, man. It was sad . . . I think it's terrible that this happened.

Antonio Fulgham can barely read or write. The 21-year-old from West Baltimore has been deemed "mentally retarded," with bleak job prospects. He blames his plight on lead poisoning he suffered as a toddler while growing up amid flaking paint in two Baltimore public housing units. Last fall a city jury agreed, and ordered the Housing Authority of Baltimore City to pay him damages that amount to $1.27 million. Although nothing can undo his brain damage, Fulgham says the money will mean "a better change in my life.

Baltimore-based Under Armour hosted a press event in New York City Tuesday to introduce what the company has dubbed "its biggest ever global marketing campaign. " While the new "I Will" campaign recalls the old "Will you protect this house?" commercial that first helped the company become popular -- the respondents always answered "I will!" -- the new spot released Tuesday focuses on an area that has become increasingly important: high-end technology and innovation. Let's just say that the commercial ends with a woman adjusting the composition and color of her clothing by using a touch screen built into her sleeve.

PARIS -- At a time when the multicultural model for society has made great progress in the United States and Britain, and is firmly established in Canada, the French are determined to stick with their policy of cultural assimilation.This is a crucial choice, since tension in France over immigration is fundamentally cultural and social in origin, rather than racial. Even National Front voters object mainly that these people are ''different'' in the way they live. They say they have created an alien society of their own inside France.

Tom Vidnovic remembers it sounding pretty silly on a cold January day about three years ago, when a friend suggested they go traipsing through the woods to look for a plastic container someone had hidden. He probably thought it was even sillier when his friend insisted on bringing along a hand-held Global Positioning System navigational device to help in the search. Vidnovic ended up finding the container before his friend did - "beginner's luck," he insists - and hasn't stopped looking for similar containers since; so far, he's found a little more than 3,100 of them.

In January 1955, Morgan State College students staged an impromptu sit-in at the lunch counter of the Read's drugstore at Howard and Lexington streets in Baltimore, demanding that African-Americans be served. Their protest, along with others at local Read's stores, worked: That month, the retail chain began serving all patrons, black and white, at all of its 37 Baltimore-area lunch counters. But the students' victory has been largely overlooked in the annals of U.S. civil rights history, in part because it was not photographed or widely reported by the mainstream news media.

At the 2:17 mark of Britney Spears' 2011 hit single "Hold It Against Me," dubstep entered the mainstream. It had been bubbling around pop's surface before Spears put her glossy touch on it, but this was Top 40's most blatant — and effective — use of the increasingly popular electronic dance music sub-genre. As Spears' vocals cut out, the track builds to a climactic "breakdown," signified by dubstep's trademark bass wobble. It's deep enough to crush your chest, and it's a huge part of what makes the genre so appealing: A song builds and builds until the rug is suddenly ripped from under it, only to re-form.