For those of you who didn’t plow through the New York Times this sunday—a fading ambivalent ritual akin to family dinners—the magazine cover story by Paul Tough tackled the continuing education gap that separates, basically, white kids from black and latino kids in the U.S. The upshot is that Bush is right: it is possible [...]

What kind of protest movements work, anyway? (Part I: Women and children take on a dictator!)

Fast food is tasty, cheap, and utterly hideous in every way. And now it’s a film.
Yum.

The GOP: party of the Christ child and of Sen. Inhofe’s End Times-obsessed reign of environmental terror!

The last turkey sandwiches have been choked down, and Christmas is all around. Snow on the ground, holiday music in the air, mistletoe-flavored coffee at Starbucks … and neighbors at each other’s throats. Break out the eggnogg!
Woman faces fines for wreath peace sign
Some neighbors in Colorado are up in arms over one resident’s [...]

The ongoing story reported by Pajamas Media about Iranian dissident Zahra Kamalfar’s two-and-a-half month exile in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport continues. The site’s accounts, updated several times a day, have a bizarro air to them, a combination of the hellish Kafka-style plight of Kamalfar, the particular details of the story and the medium— that is, the [...]

Roll tape and it looks like this: The guy was heckling Michael Richards, who was mad and so says the worst thing he could think of to insult the heckler and put him in his place. He didn’t say the most shocking thing, which is how he played it. Shocking, yes, except not the word [...]

Here’s more evidence that graphic-comic is becoming the contemporary masterpiece genre of the visual arts:
Columbian artist Fernando Botero is known for painting like a cartoonist, creating huge canvases and sculptures of whimsical thick-limbed frolicking people, figures that seem to be pulled from the magic-realist novels of fellow Columbian Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Last year Botero completed [...]

Perhaps the single most powerful, peaceful way to bring about social change is for people to stand together publicly on behalf of an important cause. After all, if you’re going to talk that talk, you better be able to walk the walk, right? Protest is a longtime part of political life, but just how successful [...]

On Nov. 30, O.J. Simpson will release a fictional account of how he would have killed Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman. How’s he gonna explain that one to his kids? “Now boys, I didn’t kill your mom but if I woulda done it, here’s how I woulda sliced her up…”
I guess he had to [...]

 
There’s definitely some tension going on in the hip hop world, and it ain’t your usual beef.  If you’re like me, tired of the status quo, then the new video from NYOIL “Ya’ll Should All Get Lynched” is refreshing, no matter how blatant it is.  This video is getting some huge traffic on the internet.  [...]

Industry plus food equals serious yuck. But how else do you expect to feed 7 billion people?

Those all-over ballroom boys are twisting it like a lightbulb in a warehouse near you.

Meantime… The unbelievable “teacher strike” continues in Oaxaca, land of mountains, delicious food, Zapatista rebels and screwed governance.
The strike has been on for more than half a year and the numbers are outrageous. For perspective: the civil rights march on Washington in 1963 drew a crowd of 250,000; the Oaxacan strike at its peaks [...]

You’ve seen the campaign. It features a slew of celebrities, each one artfully shot wearing pieces from the GAP’s RED line— a format that has become a Gap advertising trademark. This time around the cast includes Chris Rock, Steven Spielberg, Penelope Cruz, Jennifer Garner, supermodel Christi Turlington, Dakota Fanning, Mary J. Blidge and Don Cheadle. [...]