LOS ANGELES — I CAN’T help it. Every few weeks, my wife mentions the latest book her book club is reading, and no matter what it is, whether I’ve read it or not, I offer an opinion of the work, based entirely on … what, exactly? Often, these are books I’ve not even read a review or essay about, yet I freely hold forth on the grandiosity of Cheryl Strayed or the restrained sentimentality of Edwidge Danticat. These data motes are gleaned, apparently, from the ether — or, more realistically, from various social media feeds. What was Solange Knowles’s […]

Click here to view original article Faking Cultural Literacy

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For more than a decade, researchers across multiple disciplines have been issuing reports on the widespread societal and economic damage caused by America’s now-40-year experiment in locking up vast numbers of its citizens. If there is any remaining disagreement about the destructiveness of this experiment, it mirrors the so-called debate over climate change. In both cases, overwhelming evidence shows a crisis that threatens society as a whole. In both cases, those who study the problem have called for immediate correction. Several recent reports provide some of the most comprehensive and compelling proof yet that the United States “has gone […]

Click here to view original article End Mass Incarceration Now

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SAN FRANCISCO — I’M no scientist, but I sure like reading about science. I’m always looking through newspapers for the latest research about saturated fat and whether it’s still bad for you, or if maybe sugar is poison. So when I found myself 40, fat and weak, I paid special attention to exercise science articles, in the hopes of getting strong. I found stories about cutting-edge studies that claimed you should do intense, brief workouts instead of long ones. I hired personal trainers certified by the National Academy of Sports Medicine in a training methodology “founded on scientific, evidence-based […]

Click here to view original article Fitness Crazed

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PRETEND it’s 1960, and the Food and Drug Administration has just done something startling. It has taken a drug it had previously approved for infertility — brand name Enovid — and approved it for the opposite use: birth control. That pill — soon simply the Pill — triggered the sexual revolution. But not overnight. Doctors at first resisted giving it to unmarried women. Women were shy about carrying evidence that they actually planned to have sex. Pioneering feminists like Margaret Sanger and Katharine D. McCormick braved vilification to champion it. Madison Avenue chimed in: Ads featured Andromeda, the princess […]

Click here to view original article Are We Ready for H.I.V.’s Sexual Revolution?

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Even if you’ve never seen a Shakespeare play, you’ll have used one of his words or phrases. Hephzibah Anderson explains his genius – and enduring influence. If you missed Shakespeare’s 450th birthday, you can be sure he’d have had a zinger of a putdown to sling your way. Or better yet, a whole string of them. “Thou art a boil, a plague sore, an embossed carbuncle in my corrupted blood" might just do it, borrowed from King Lear railing against his daughter, Goneril. Or perhaps he’d settle for more aloof damnation, along the lines of Orlando’s insult to Jaques in As […]

Click here to view original article How Shakespeare influences the way we speak now

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