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The article presents an introduction to a roundtable discussion on Black masculine vulnerability, with topics including black vulnerability, the presidency of Barack Obama, and the killing of Trayvon Martin.

This essay analyzes literary and theoretical approaches to teaching the Black Lives Matter Movement in a college class. By focusing on the prevalence of memoir as a way of capturing responses to racial violence, surveillance, and police brutality, this essay argues that narratives of vulnerability and radical declarations of Black lives mattering in the classroom provide a unique site of context for black liberation movements and other Black Lives Matter Syllabi. In addition, the essay attends to students' difficulties in a course dedicated to analyzing black dispossession and death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Black film directors in the early 1990s created visual representations of black urban experiences in predominantly impoverished areas described as hood films" The 1995 film Friday (dir. F. Gary Gray) used humor and laughter help to change the tenor of hood films from the early 1990s. This article explores the use of humor and vulnerability in the construction of black masculinities in Friday to argue that the subtle emotional labor throughout the film provides nuance to the gangsta rap iconography by depicting black life in the hood beyond the sites of grief and anger--two emotions that largely encapsulated the representations of black men in rap and film in the gangsta rap era of the early '90s. The film indirectly centers the emotional lives of black men oscillating between joy, love, and fear as the necessary affective range of self-care and survival in the hood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consistent with human gambling behavior but contrary to optimal foraging theory, pigeons show a strong preference for an alternative with low probability and high payoff (a gambling-like alternative) over an alternative with a greater net payoff (Zentall & Stagner, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 278, 1203-1208, ). In the present research, we asked whether humans would show suboptimal choice on a task involving choices with probabilities similar to those for pigeons. In Experiment 1, when we selected participants on the basis of their self-reported gambling activities, we found a significantly greater choice of the alternative involving low probability and high payoff (gambling-like alternative) than for a group that reported an absence of gambling activity. In Experiment 2, we found that when the inhibiting abilities of typical humans were impaired by a self-regulatory depletion manipulation, they were more likely to choose the gambling-like alternative. Taken together, the results suggest that this task is suitable for the comparative study of suboptimal decision-making behavior and the mechanisms that underlie it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]