Society

Nigs R Us Or How Blackfolk Became Fetish Objects
Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture
by Greg Tate (Editor)
White kids from the 'burbs are throwing up gang signs. The 2001 Grammy winner for best rap artist was as white as rice. And blond-haired sorority sisters are sporting FUBU gear.

Love It or Leave It : Part 2
Don't Get Too Comfortable
by David Rakoff
All by way of saying, that if there ever came a time when the government of my new homeland was actually calling up the forty-something asking-and-telling homosexuals with hypo-active thyroids to take up arms, something very calamitous indeed will have

Love It or Leave It
Don't Get Too Comfortable
by David Rakoff
George W. Bush made me want to be an American. It was a need I had not known before. A desire that came over me in a rush one day, not unlike that of the pencil-necked honors student suddenly overwhelmed with the inexplicable urge to make a daily gift

The Form Complete
Adam's Navel: A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Form
by Michael Sims
Neanderthals yawned. Tutankhamen cried. Eleanor of Aquitaine belched. No doubt Murasaki Shikibu combed her hair and Askia Muhammad liked to prop up his feet. The pages of Louis XV yearned to sit down.

Affirmative Actions, Part 4
Post-Soul Nation: The Explosive, Contradictory, Triumphant, and Tragic 1980s as Experienced by African Americans (Previously Known as Blacks and Before That Negroes)
by Nelson George
Despite having enjoyed some solo hits, Michael struggled through adolescence as he searched for a grown-up identity (both on vinyl and off). The trick that underlies Off the Wall is how deftly veteran producer Quincy Jones matures the singer

Affirmative Actions, Part 3
Post-Soul Nation: The Explosive, Contradictory, Triumphant, and Tragic 1980s as Experienced by African Americans (Previously Known as Blacks and Before That Negroes)
by Nelson George
At our starting point, black culture is in the mainstream to a degree. There are blacks in sitcoms and on local news. Several major cities have black mayors and desegregation is public policy in all fifty states.

Affirmative Actions, Part 2
Post-Soul Nation: The Explosive, Contradictory, Triumphant, and Tragic 1980s as Experienced by African Americans (Previously Known as Blacks and Before That Negroes)
by Nelson George
One of the safe assumptions of Post-Soul Nation is that the inventions, phenomena, and fads evolving out of the black community eventually shape the lives of nonblack Americans.

Affirmative Actions
Post-Soul Nation: The Explosive, Contradictory, Triumphant, and Tragic 1980s as Experienced by African Americans (Previously Known as Blacks and Before That Negroes)
by Nelson George
For centuries the word soul was (pardon the pun) solely employed by religious leaders and philosophers to describe man's spiritual core. The soul could be cursed to eternal damnation. The soul could rise up to heavenly salvation.

Modern Montana
Collapse. How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
by Jared Diamond, Ph.D.
When I asked my friend Stan Falkow, a 70-year-old professor of microbiology at Stanford University near San Francisco, why he had bought a second home in Montana's Bitterroot Valley, he told me how it had fitted into the story of his life.

Part 4
Collapse. How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
by Jared Diamond, Ph.D.
Issues of human environmental impacts today tend to be controversial, and opinions about them tend to fall on a spectrum between two opposite camps. One camp, usually referred to as environmentalist or pro-environment, holds that our current environmental

Part 3
Collapse. How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
by Jared Diamond, Ph.D.
A first set of factors involves damage that people inadvertently inflict on their environment, as already discussed. The extent and reversibility of that damage depend partly on properties of people (e.g., how many trees they cut down per acre per year)

Part 2
Collapse. How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
by Jared Diamond, Ph.D.
But the seriousness of these current environmental problems is vigorously debated. Are the risks greatly exaggerated, or conversely are they underestimated? Does it stand to reason that today's human population of almost seven billion, with our potent

A Tale of Two Farms
Collapse. How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
by Jared Diamond, Ph.D.
A few summers ago I visited two dairy farms, Huls Farm and Gardar Farm, which despite being located thousands of miles apart were still remarkably similar in their strengths and vulnerabilities.

'Cut Yer Thumb er Finger Off'
Jim Crow's Children: The Broken Promise of the Brown Decision
by Peter Irons, Ph.D., J.D.
These stories of former slaves, recorded in the 1930s by interviewers from the Federal Writers' Project, tell in poignant words of the struggle for education of people the Supreme Court described in its Dred Scott decision of 1857 as beings

Part 4
American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare
by Jason DeParle
When she and Jewell met at the station there was no time for a reunion scene. They piled the kids and suitcases aboard and headed off for the two-hour ride up I-94. When Angie got home from work that night, she found a new resident of the compound

The Pledge
American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare
by Jason DeParle
Bruce Reed needed a better line. A little-known speechwriter in a long-shot campaign, he was trapped in the office on a Saturday afternoon, staring at a flat phrase.

The Sleeper Curve
Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter
by Steven Johnson
Every childhood has its talismans, the sacred objects that look innocuous enough to the outside world, but that trigger an onslaught of vivid memories when the grown child confronts them.

Blacks on Television, Part 3
Authentically Black: Essays for the Black Silent Majority
by John McWhorter
A far cry from Beulah in the Hendersons' kitchen. Yet amid it all, throughout most of the 1960s there was not a single 'black show' proper on national television. This changed in 1968 with Julia, starring Diahann Carroll.

Blacks on Television
Authentically Black: Essays for the Black Silent Majority
by John McWhorter
I once appeared on a television talk show with a black professor where as usual I was cast as the conservative voice in opposition to his liberal one. As we chatted during a commercial break, I asked him, 'What kind of thing leads you to think that racism

Roots Of The Rejuvenile
Rejuvenile
by Christopher Noxon
Before he was a cash cow for Walt Disney, an inspiration for Steven Spielberg, and an obsession for Michael Jackson, Peter Pan was simply a revelation. When J. M. Barrie's play Peter Pan, subtitled The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, opened at the Duke of York