We were not among the critics who recently took offense to Tyler Perry's frocked-out "minstrelsy" antics in Meet the Browns, but we are more than a little beside ourselves with today's news that Perry has cast Keshia Knight Pulliam — best known as the youngest Huxtable child, Rudy, on The Cosby Show — as an "imprisoned prostitute" in his upcoming installment in the Madea canon, Tyler Perry's Madea Goes to Jail. We can't believe it; she grew up so fast!

Bill Cosby is back in the news! And as cranky as ever. The Atlantic has a loooooong think piece about Cosby by Ta-Nehisi Coates, who incidentally is one of the only tolerable writers about hip hop ever to work outside of the music press. Coates runs down Cosby's whole history, and his transformation from the friendly black face popular with black and white Americans alike to a latter-day Booker T. Washington whose gruff dismissal of things like, you know, racism, rubs a lot of people the wrong way. But the key lesson of the story: whatever you do, don't ask Bill Cosby about Obama!

Bill Cosby is supposedly going to cut a non-profane rap album called State of Emergency, and in just half a day the news is dusted up the sort of controversy once reserved for rap albums with graphic sex, cop-killing violence and psychopathic clowns. Entertainment Weekly thinks Cosby will "embarrass himself," New York Magazine speculates the album will be "terrible" and the commenters at All Hip Hop are barely more kind, particularly given Cosby's previous criticism of an urban subset of black teenagers. But Cosby has become a more interesting cultural critic in his old age than most hot rappers are now that their genre has awkwardly matured and their once-controversial macho poses become stale. Also, the man's Sergeant Pepper rendition is brilliant, audio excerpt after the jump.

Bill Cosby's new book, "Come On, People: On the Path from Victims to Victors," (written with Dr. Alvin F. Poussaint, 243 pages) is a big ball of crazy, kind of like the yearly harangue you get from your grandfather: "Why don't you have a real job yet? Why can't you hang on to a significant other?" Except it's completely directed at black folks! Like W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington before him, Cosby gamely suggests that black people pull themselves up by the bootstraps. From chapters ranging from "What's Going On With Black Men?" to "We All Start Out As Children," Cosby overshares his kooky ideas about the world, pissing and moaning that black Americans need to "tone down the culture" and "get smart about sex." Of course "When we were kids" is used more than once, and, did you know? In those days, kids knew their place (and knew how to act!) To underscore this point, he helpfully puts in quotations any word that seems "hip," "cool," or "new." Let's start with chapter 1, in which Bill Cosby casually enforces racial stereotypes.