A visceral sense of domestic decline is coursing through contemporary American culture and politics – and it’s become one of the central themes of this year’s presidential campaign. Donald Trump in particular has used it to stoke the inchoate anger of his supporters, telling them: “Our country is falling apart. Our infrastructure is falling apart … Our airports are, like, third world.”
The four key elements of ethnic culture respondents mentioned were language, food, holiday celebrations, and values. As Kelly H. Chong investigated how the couples sought to preserve ethnic traditions, food and holiday celebrations were the only cultural elements passed down among generations in a concrete way.
The race for the Republican presidential nomination has provided pundits with ample opportunity to claim that we have reached an all-time low in terms of fractiousness, divisiveness and vulgarity.
Luis is an upper-middle-class American-born Latino. When I interviewed him in 2008, he told me he had spent long hours, and a substantial amount of money, restoring a classic Chevy truck.
In issues as diverse as domestic violence to media representation, women have made themselves heard in 2015.
The Justice Department announced that nearly 6,000 people in federal prisons will be going home early. The move, U.S. officials told the Washington Post, is an effort to both reduce overcrowding and to provide relief to people who received harsh drug war sentences over the past three decades.
The murder of two journalists in Virginia, live on TV, by a disgruntled co-worker who later shot himself, has once again sparked debates about gun legislation in the US, with the White House calling for action by Congress.
For a few days in late February, social media users were transfixed by a debate over the color of a dress posted on Tumblr: Was the dress blue and black, or white and gold? More than a million tweets, associated with the hashtags #thedress, #whiteandgold and #blackandblue, turned the debate into a social media phenomenon.
There are hidden, and serious, ethical issues in the news media. It has become an industry in which editors and journalists routinely select the most disturbing and shocking news for our daily, or even hourly, consumption.
The new thinking we need will not emerge all at once, in one fell swoop. It will come about—and is already coming about—as contemporary thinking is increasingly questioned. There is a step before we can embrace new ideas: it is to put the old ideas on trial.
As California endures its worst drought since records began, illegal marijuana plantations are being blamed for further depleting precious water resources.
In today’s China, the philosopher Confucius is back. To mark his 2,565th birthday this September, the nation’s President, Xi Jinping, paid homage to the sage at an international conference convened for the occasion.
What if you asked Americans in largely "red" or Republican districts and largely "blue" or Democratic districts very specific questions about what government should do—about taxes, reproductive rights, foreign affairs, and the like, and 96 percent of the time they agreed? And 69 percent of the time there wasn't even a statistically significant difference ...
- By Molly Rusk
Why did an elementary school math problem go viral? It has to do with a new set of federal education standards known as the Common Core.
"...the public is currently being denied the right to be fully informed about the risks it is facing. There are many reasons for this, from “doubt-mongering” to ideologically-motivated denial. We know from much research on misinformation that people cannot dismiss “noise” or misinformation unless they are given a reason to do so."
Accurately understanding our natural environment and sharing that information can be a matter of life or death. When it comes to global warming, much of the public remains in denial about a set of facts that the majority of scientists clearly agree on. With such high stakes, an organized campaign funding misinformation ought to be considered criminally negligent.
The Tea Party is just the popular face of corporate power in the United States, says political philosopher Noam Chomsky. “I wouldn’t call them revolutionary,” Chomsky said, dismissing a suggestion that the conservative political faction had anarchist characteristics.
Almost all of the medical research with psychedelic drugs to date has been focused on curing diseases and treating illnesses. Little attention has been paid to the reported ability of these remarkable substances to increase human potential, and even less attention has been paid to their reputed ability to significantly enhance all aspects of human pleasure...
I read a quote from Thoreau, and his words stopped me cold: "We are all schoolmasters and the universe is our school house." As Thoreau says, this is everyone's true nature — being a teacher. I don't mean the teacher who stands up in front of a classroom. I mean someone who nurtures and inspires and encourages and guides and challenges...
When Timothy Leary was diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer at age seventy-six, he said that he was “thrilled and ecstatic” to hear that he was going die. As much as Leary loved life, he not only accepted death but also embraced it...
- By Miles Olson
The myth of progress tells a story in which everything that came before this moment is useless and obsolete. Many will agree that the idea of progress, which is the ideological underpinning of civilization, is delusional, but still wonder where does it leave us if we...
- By Emily Badger
Retail redlining is a more recent and less studied variation on redlining as it's been historically recognized in the housing sector.
Psychiatric heretic R. D. Laing wrote, “The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man.” In Laing’s mind normality is insanity, whereas madness may be a path to “hypersanity.”