Society

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

The American Culture Code for love is FALSE EXPECTATION
The Culture Code
by Dr. Clotaire Rapaille
Without question, losing at love is an international experience. Even in cultures where marriages are arranged and courtship is rare, there are tales of forbidden love and the sad consequences when that love dies.

The Growing Pains of an Adolescent Culture: The Codes for Love, Seduction and Sex
The Culture Code
by Dr. Clotaire Rapaille
As you will learn throughout this book, the American culture exhibits many of the traits consistent with adolescence: intense focus on 'the now,' dramatic mood swings, constant need for exploration and challenge to authority, a fascination with extremes

Introduction
The Culture Code
by Dr. Clotaire Rapaille
The Culture Code is the unconscious meaning we apply to any given thing - a car, a type of food, a relationship, even a country - via the culture in which we are raised.

Dobie Gillis Williams
The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions
by Sister Helen Prejean, CSJ
Brave and fiercely argued new book that tests the moral edge of the debate on capital punishment: What if we're executing innocent men? Two cases in point are Dobie Gillis Williams, an indigent black man with an IQ of 65, and Joseph Roger O'Dell.

“That's Our Biggest Difference”
Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind
by David Berreby
There are so many ways to sort people. We all do it, all the time. From everyday decisions (whom to invite to dinner?) to life choices (whom to marry?) to the great turning points of history (whom to war against?), we're guided by an ever-present sense

In a small village near Kandahar

An eye-opening personal account of an epic human drama, Embracing the Infidel takes us on an astounding journey along a modern-day underground railroad that stretches from Istanbul to Paris. In this groundbreaking book, Iranian-American Behzad Yaghmaian

Chapter 3
The Lost Children of Wilder: The Epic Struggle to Change Foster Care
by Nina Bernstein
In 1973, a young ACLU attorney filed a controversial class-action lawsuit that challenged New York City's operation of its foster-care system. The plaintiff was an abused runaway named Shirley Wilder who had suffered from the system's inequities.

Integration: Together and Separate
A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America
by David K. Shipler
A Country of Strangers is a magnificent exploration of the psychological landscape where blacks and whites meet. To tell the story in human rather than abstract terms, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer David K. Shipler bypasses both extremists

Money and Its Opposite
The Working Poor: Invisible in America
by David K. Shipler
“Nobody who works hard should be poor in America,” writes Pulitzer Prize winner David Shipler. Clear-headed, rigorous, and compassionate, he journeys deeply into the lives of individual store clerks and factory workers, farm laborers and sweat