Culture
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Guest essayist Desiree Cooper argues that confronting one of the most uncomfortable aspects of the new film "The Help" -- the depiction of affection between maids and the families they worked for -- can help lead to a better understanding of our racial histories.
'The Help' and racial history
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Young and Arab-American in a post-9/11 world
A Michigan photo exhibit allows young Arab-Americans with no memory of 9/11 present snapshots of their lives growing up in a post-9/11 world.Same-sex marriage and the 2012 campaign
Liberals are dissatisfied with the president's economic approach. But there's one issue left that could re-energize Obama's base: gay marriage.
Fast and too furious?
In the weeks following the tragic Boston bombings, the American public has had time to reflect on the mainstream media’s coverage of the crisis. Several news outlets have been criticized for their inaccurate reporting of critical details. Judy Dalglish, Dean of the Phillip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland argues that because in [...]
Steinbeck’s Salinas Valley
Library of Congress FSA/OWI Photographs NPR:’Grapes Of Wrath’ And The Politics of Book Burning Nobel Prizes: John Steinbeck The Steinbeck Institute The Steinbeck Center PBS: The American Novel: John Steinbeck PBS: The Fight in the Fields
Steinbeck’s The Harvest Gypsies
Before he wrote his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck was commissioned by The San Francisco News to write a series of articles on the migrant laborers of the Salinas Valley. The result, ‘The Harvest Gypsies” (1936) were published consecutively from October 5 to October 12, 1936. In 1938 the Simon J. [...]
Creating art from tragedy
“Over the years I’ve not written about the shootings. And never felt any special compunction to do so,” Filkins said. “And yet, when the Newtown shooting happened… because it was these children, I felt compelled to try to write something.”
Do violent video games make us violent?
Watch Can Violent Video Games Play a Role in Violent Behavior? on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour. Media outlets spent the day speculating about a CBS report that Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza had blacked out his bedroom and game-room windows, and spent hours playing violent video games. But what do we know about [...]
Interview: Claudio Iván Remeseira
Editor-in-chief of “Hispanic New York” (www.hispanicny.com), a blog and social media platform on Latino and Latin American news and culture.
Explore the banned curriculum
In this week’s Need to Know, we report on the long-running dispute over a Mexican-American studies program that has tensions high in Tucson, Arizona. But what’s behind the uproar? What does the contested curriculum actually look like? Here we explore two of the banned books in Tucson — and ask you to form your own opinions [...]
Read the report
Via the Tucson Sentinel: An independent audit of Tucson Unified School District’s Mexican American Studies Department doesn’t support the declaration by state schools chief John Huppenthal that TUSD’s ethnic studies classes violate the law. TUSD ethnic studies audit View Need to Know’s report “Banned in Arizona.”
Reading roundup 2012
The end of every calendar year delivers a mass of “best of” listings. Every publication and and personality seems to feel the need to have their say about topics from royal news to sports photos. But there is an subsection of these offerings well worth investigating — the best reads, especially the best long reads, [...]
After Newtown
As the country comes together to grieve the loss of life in Newtown, a national conversation has begun about how to better protect and serve our communities in the face of catastrophe. The questions of how to respond to these tragedies face us all: government at all levels, educators, mental health professionals, the media, and [...]
