Editor's Picks

Atlantic City: Empire or Fantasyland?

The Atlantic City celebrated in “Boardwalk Empire” was not just a city of mobsters, speakeasies, and brothels. It was, in the words of a longtime resident born in Georgia, a “Jim Crow for sure.” Its schools, clubs, neighborhoods, and movie houses were segregated. In 1923, just three years after the start of Prohibition, the city opened a brand new school that included a 1,000-seat auditorium and a 6,000-pipe organ, at a total cost of over $1.75 million. It also included an indoor pool, but rather than have whites and African Americans swim together, officials covered it up.

My BFF just told me “TTYL” is in the dictionary. LMAO.

It’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for. New words, senses, and phrases have been added to the New Oxford American Dictionary! I’m not going to list every addition, but here’s a sampling I think you’ll all find interesting…. BFF, Big Media, Bromance, Carbon Credit, Cloud Computing and Eggcorn.

Celebrating the King James Bible

By Gordon Campbell
Why all the fuss about an old translation of an ancient book? There are two reasons: first, it is the founding text of the British Empire (including breakaway colonies such as the United States), and was carried to every corner of the English-speaking world by migrants and missionaries; second, it matters now, both as a religious text and as the finest embodiment of English prose. Its history in the intervening centuries has been complex. The text has evolved…

Death to Humans! (The Apocalypse Remix)

By Robert M. Geraci
Scientific American recently rocked the Internet with its editors’ piece “Death to Humans! Visions of the Apocalypse in Movies and Literature” but, in doing so, have missed half of the fun. In an article where the sublime (The Matrix) meets the atrocious (The Postman), the chief problem that SciAm’s editors suffer is that, to be honest, they do not know what an apocalypse is.

6 Myths about Teens & Christian Faith in America

By Kenda Creasy Dean
Have you heard this one? Mom is angling to get 16-year-old Tony to come to church on Sunday, and Tony will have none of it. “Don’t you get it?” he yells, pushing his chair away from the table. “I hate church! I am not like you! The church is full of hypocrites!” Dramatic exit, stage right. This story sounds true – but it isn’t.

20-somethings: NOT lazy, spoiled, or selfish

By Jeffrey Arnett
How do you know when you’ve reached adulthood? This is one of the first questions I asked when I began my research on people in their twenties, and it remains among the most fascinating to me. I expected that people would mostly respond in terms of the traditional transition events that take place for most people in the 18-29 age period: moving out of parents’ household, finishing education, marriage, and parenthood. To my surprise, none of these…

Memo from Lower Manhattan: The Mosque

By Sharon Zukin
Of all the mosques, in all the towns, in all the world, why did this mosque cause a furor in this town? I’m speaking about Park51, an Islamic “community center promoting tolerance and understanding,” as its website says, which is being planned to replace an old five-story building in Lower Manhattan that formerly housed a Burlington Coat Factory store with a modern, thirteen-story multi-service facility modeled on Jewish community centers and the YMCA. The burning issue…

The Changing Face of the AIDS Epidemic

By Alan Whiteside
In Russia, Ukraine and some of the other former Soviet countries HIV transmission through injecting drug users is affecting significant proportions of young men and is spreading quickly. They in turn pass the disease on to their partners, who may then transmit it to their children. While the absolute numbers are not high, the proportionate impact will be significant. In Africa AIDS is again different. There are some…

Booze! – Episode 1 – The Oxford Comment

In the premiere episode of The Oxford Comment, Lauren and Michelle talk to Benjamin Carp about the drinking habits of the Founding Fathers and visit brewmaster Garrett Oliver at the Brooklyn Brewery.

California’s Channel Island Kelp Forests — Are They Recovering?

By Christopher Wills
As my blood thins with age, I tend to SCUBA dive in the tropics. But in July of 2010, loaded with twenty-four pounds of lead weights to overcome the buoyancy of my thick wet suit and the dense salty water of the frigid Japanese Current, I found myself plunging into cold water to investigate an ecological success story off California’s Channel Islands. I wanted to see what happens when a damaged ecosystem recovers. Can it ever return to its former self?

How Old is the Parasite “Like”?

By Anatoly Liberman
When did people begin to say: “I will, like, come tomorrow” and why do they say so? It may seem that the filler “like”, along with its twin “you know”, are of recent date, but this impression is wrong. It is, however, true that both became the plague in recent memory. Occasionally an etymologist discovers a word that was current in Middle or early Modern English, disappeared from view, and then seemingly resurfaced in the modern language. One wonders whether this is the same word…

The Secret Behind Glenn Beck’s Magic

By Elvin Lim
Nolstalgia is the selective invocation of the past. It is probably the worst kind of historical reasoning used by romantics who glorify what we remember to be good (Mom and pie) and conveniently forget all that was bad (Jim and Crow). Because nostalgia is history without the guilt, it is the most comforting kind of political appeal. And since there is no guilt without details, Beck’s bumper-sticker speech communicated offensive content without offending.

Missing sleep can make you fat, sad, and stupid

A new school year is about to start, and we all know how sleep-deprived students can be. Parents and teachers may sound like broken records, but Dr. Rosalind Cartwright can tell you that good sleeping habits are nothing to roll your eyes at.

The gender-neutral pronoun: 150 years later, still an epic fail

By Dennis Baron

Every once in a while someone decides to do something about the fact that English has no gender-neutral pronoun. They either call for such a pronoun to be invented, or they invent one and champion its adoption. Wordsmiths have been coining gender-neutral pronouns for over a century and a half.

What is Energy?

By Jennifer Coopersmith
Energy is the go of things, the driver of engines, devices and all physical processes. It can come in various forms (electrical, chemical, rest mass, curvature of spacetime, light, heat and so on) and change between these forms, but the total is always conserved.

When the Stasi Came for the Doctor

Gary Bruce is Associate Professor of History at the University of Waterloo. His newest book is The Firm: The Inside Story of the Stasi. The book is based on previously classified documents and interviews with former secret police officers and ordinary citizens and is the first comprehensive history of East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi, at the grassroots level. In the excerpt below Bruce looks at how the Stasi impacted one ordinary man’s life.