Harvey Cox, “The Warring Visions of the Religious Right”; Eric Schlosser, “In the Strawberry Fields”; Steven Lagerfeld, “What Main Street Could Learn From the Mall”; Michael Finkel, “The World's Toughest Competition”; and much more.
The management of California's strawberry industry offers a case study of both the dependence on an imported peasantry that characterizes much of American agriculture and the destructive consequences of a deliberate low-wage economy.
Regent University is the intellectual and theological center of the Christian Coalition. What is it like there? Does an inverse political correctness rule? What theology is taught, and what are its political implications? On a recent visit the author, a noted Harvard theologian, found some surprising answers -- among them, that the "Christian right" is no monolith
A guided tour with a landscape architect and retailing specialist who believes that shopping malls -- vilify them though we might -- can offer moribund cities what they desperately need: practical lessons in the psychology of commerce
The former president never uttered his successor’s name at an event in Chicago, but the animus was obvious.
CHICAGO—The midterms are done, and Barack Obama is trying to get back to his post-presidency. He still thinks the country and the world are broken, but he’s dropping back out of the public debate, urging those who came to his foundation’s second annual summit here on Monday that they need to pick back up the charge for change.
“You literally can remake the world right now, because it badly needs remaking,” Obama said.
The answers to fixing problems in agriculture, education, sustainable energy, and other fields, he said, aren’t as complicated as they’re made out to be. But, he insisted, “the reason we don’t do it is because we are still confused, blind, shrouded with hate, anger, racism, mommy issues.”
Priests are fielding more requests than ever for help with demonic possession, and a centuries-old practice is finding new footing in the modern world.
Louisa Muskovits appeared to be having a panic attack. It was March of 2016, and Louisa, a 33-year-old with a history of alcohol abuse, was having a regular weekly session with her chemical-dependency counselor in Tacoma, Washington.
Louisa had recently separated from her husband, Steven. When the counselor asked about her marriage, she said she wasn’t ready to talk about it. The counselor pressed, and again Louisa demurred. Eventually the conversation grew tense, and Louisa started to hyperventilate, a common symptom of a panic attack.
The counselor rushed down the hall to get Louisa’s therapist, Amy Harp. Together they moved Louisa to Harp’s office, where they felt they could better calm her. But once Louisa was there, Harp recalls, her demeanor transformed. Normally friendly and open, she started screaming and pulling out clumps of her hair. She growled and glared. Her head flailed from side to side, cocking back at odd angles. In jumbled bursts, she muttered about good and evil, God and the devil. She told the counselors that no one there could save “Louisa.”
Lawmakers thought Nixon’s gathering of inside information about the Watergate probe from DOJ was an impeachable offense.
Nearly 45 years ago, the House Judiciary Committee concluded that President Richard Nixon’s contact with high-level Justice Department officials overseeing the Watergate investigation, detailed in a 62-page “road map” of evidence collected by prosecutors in 1972–73, amounted to an impeachable misuse of executive power.
A half century later, the FBI’s former top lawyer, Jim Baker—a close friend and associate of fired FBI Director James Comey—is laying out parallels, albeit subtly, to President Donald Trump’s interactions with the law-enforcement officials who have been investigating him and his campaign team since July 2016.
In a piece for Lawfare published on Monday, Baker and co-author Sarah Grant, a student at Harvard Law School, used the newly unsealed Watergate road map to show how one president’s attempts to control an investigation targeting him and his associates were quickly exposed and, ultimately, used against him. As the road map laid out, Nixon interacted regularly with the man supervising the Watergate investigation—Henry Petersen, then the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Criminal Division—and pumped him for information.
Despite the easing of taboos and the rise of hookup apps, Americans are in the midst of a sex recession.
These should be boom times for sex.
The share of Americans who say sex between unmarried adults is “not wrong at all” is at an all-time high. New cases of HIV are at an all-time low. Most women can—at last—get birth control for free, and the morning-after pill without a prescription.
If hookups are your thing, Grindr and Tinder offer the prospect of casual sex within the hour. The phrase If something exists, there is porn of it used to be a clever internet meme; now it’s a truism. BDSM plays at the local multiplex—but why bother going? Sex is portrayed, often graphically and sometimes gorgeously, on prime-time cable. Sexting is, statistically speaking, normal.
Another big project has found that only half of studies can be repeated. And this time, the usual explanations fall flat.
Over the past few years, an international team of almost 200 psychologists has been trying to repeat a set of previously published experiments from its field, to see if it can get the same results. Despite its best efforts, the project, called Many Labs 2, has only succeeded in 14 out of 28 cases. Six years ago, that might have been shocking. Now it comes as expected (if still somewhat disturbing) news.
In recent years, it has become painfully clear that psychology is facing a “reproducibility crisis,” in which even famous, long-established phenomena—the stuff of textbooks and TED Talks—might not be real. There’s social priming, where subliminal exposures can influence our behavior. And ego depletion, the idea that we have a limited supply of willpower that can be exhausted. And the facial-feedback hypothesis, which simply says that smiling makes us feel happier.
A Thanksgiving story about the limits of human empathy
YELLVILLE, Arkansas — It is October in the Ozarks. The grass has dried out and the trees have bronzed and browned. Deer lie glaze-eyed in the back of camouflaged pickup trucks. High-school football helmets crack every Friday night. And seven days a week, workers in processing plants are helping to kill, gut, pluck, and truss turkeys for Thanksgiving tables around the country.
Here in Yellville, this cold and rainy weekend, there are turkeys everywhere—turkey shirts and turkey costumes and turkey paraphernalia. There is a raffle giving away birds for Thanksgiving dinner. There’s a brisk trade in turkey legs too, pulled out of a barrel smoker. At the bandstand, a judge announces the winner of the “Miss Drumsticks” contest, who gleams and sparkles in her pageant finery. “It’s Miss Drumsticks because they’re judging who has the best thighs,” an older woman explained to me, matter-of-fact.
The Supreme Court must decide the fate of a murderer—and whether roughly half of Oklahoma is rightfully reservation land.
Fifteen years ago, an assistant federal public defender and a defense investigator found a cross commemorating a murder beside a deserted road in eastern Oklahoma. It wasn’t where it was supposed to be. Law enforcement records said it should be about a mile and a quarter away. That slight discrepancy has led to a Supreme Court case slated for oral arguments on November 27. Formally at stake is the fate of a brutal murderer, Patrick Dwayne Murphy. But the Court must also decide whether that roadside crime scene is now and has always been a part of the Muscogee Creek Reservation.
Not just that scene—as much as 5,000 other square miles, including much of the city of Tulsa.
If the answer is “yes,” there is a chance that the same will be true of historic reservations originally granted to the other “Civilized Tribes” who were removed to what is now Oklahoma by Andrew Jackson—the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole nations—meaning that roughly half of Oklahoma might be reservation land.
A definitive, logical answer to an unresolved question
In the spirit of a holiday when people, in claustrophobic proximity to their loved ones, feel compelled to take stronger-than-usual positions on issues of even minuscule import, I have a conclusion to share: The correct time to eat Thanksgiving dinner is 4 p.m.
There are many obvious reasons why this is the case. Start with the turkey. It needs about four hours in the oven (give or take, depending on the size). It also needs to be prepped before it can go in, and then should rest for about a half hour afterward before being carved.
Let’s say this process, from raw bird to neat slices, takes about five hours (and that is if everything goes exactly to plan). If Thanksgiving dinner is to take place at 2 p.m., as many incorrect people have suggested, cooking must commence at 9 a.m. Does that sound like an unhurried, cozy holiday morning? No. It sounds like a workday.
Donald Trump likes to pit elite and non-elite white people against each other. Why do white liberals play into his trap?
“I want them to talk about racism every day,” Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s former strategist, told The American Prospectlast year. “If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”
Bannon was tapping into an old American tradition. As early as the 1680s, powerful white people were serving up racism to assuage the injuries of class, elevating the status of white indentured servants over that of enslaved black people. Some two centuries later, W. E. B. Du Bois observed that poor white people were compensated partly by a “public and psychological wage”—the “wages of whiteness,” as the historian David Roediger memorably put it. These wages pit people of different races against one another, averting a coalition based on shared economic interests.
At an inaugural desert festival of yogis and spirit guides like Russell Brand, an exclusive industry grapples with consumerism, addiction, and the actual meaning of wellness.
I first felt reality shift when, at 7 a.m. on a Saturday, there was a line for a class called Body Blast Bootcamp, and I worried that there wouldn’t be enough room for everyone.
The draw to this explicitly not-fun undertaking, others in line told me, was that we would be glad to have done it when it was over. We all made it in, and the workout studio was a carpeted conference room where an Instagram-famous instructor with a microphone headset was waiting to give us high fives. “The hardest step is showing up!”
Once we started working out, a person walked around apparently taking Instagram videos, and people were not bothered by this. Another brought a mini tripod to get some shots of herself in action. There was shouting and a Coldplay house remix. Someone offered me a box of alkaline water, and I drank it because no neutral water was available.
