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Respectability politics makes us comfortable. It hoists us up on our high horses, and takes away our responsibility for the way we treat other people. It puts the burden on the marginalized person to adjust their appearance or behavior to earn respect from the majority.

The Daily Show host put comedy aside to remind us that Paris truly embodied the values of ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité.’

Why are we ready to hold big corporations legally liable for lying, but not all the other advocates whose manipulation of the truth does society real harm!?

If You Work in a Creative Industry, You Should Steal Other People’s Ideas Just as Shakespeare lifted plots from his predecessors, young performers today ought to focus on emulating those […]

Words of wisdom from A. Philip Randolph: “Men often hate each other because they fear each other; they fear each other because they do not know each other; they do not know each other because they cannot communicate; they cannot communicate because they are separated.” 

This isn’t the Matrix. Should you wish to face the ugly reality, there’s no red pill you can swallow.

“People are afraid, and when people are afraid, when their pie is shrinking, they look for somebody to hate. They look for somebody to blame. And a real leader speaks to anxiety and to fear and allays those fears, assuages anxiety.”

Proposals to completely eliminate parental choice over whether their kids will be vaccinated can backfire and drive more parents into the anti-vaccination camp.

On October 3, 1948, at 3:50 pm, Peter Blume finished his epic painting, years in the making, titled The Rock (shown above). “After a turbulent decade in which Peter Blume embarked on false starts, endured debilitating anxiety, experienced self-doubt, and found his faith in the creative process renewed,” Robert Cozzolino writes in the catalog to the new exhibition Peter Blume: Nature and Metamorphosis, finishing The Rock must have been a great relief. Blume recorded that date and time the way many record the birth of their children, for The Rock was his precious baby, but completing it marked a rebirth of sorts for Blume as a different kind of artist. Shaped by political and artistic currents of the first half of the 20th century, Blume emerges as a difficult to categorize artist, but also as a fascinating visionary who struggled to paint a personal reality clinging to the foundation of hope.

Pitching 1,807 innings against the most feared hitters on the planet, including Ken Griffey Jr., Barry Bonds, and Cal Ripken Jr., is no easy feat. It takes as much mental […]

            What do you know about fracking, the process of injecting water and sand and chemicals under high pressure into deep rock, cracking the rock open and allowing recovery of […]

An intriguing piece of research has added an unexpected category of things that evolution may have taught us, down in our DNA, to be afraid of. Plants.

This past weekend people gathered in the nation’s capitol to mark the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech that was part of the […]

            It’s been a bad few weeks for RadioPhobia, the powerful fear of radiation that far exceeds the actual risk. From three different places come new examples of this version […]

Which sayings are true, and which ones just sound nice?   

 The most revealing and important line in Angelina Jolie’s OpEd in the New York Times today  is not the one in which she reveals she has had her breasts removed […]

This article was originally published on AlterNet. What kind of world would we have if a majority of the human race was atheist? To hear religious apologists tell it, the […]

–Guest post by Erin Brett, American University graduate student. Last month, in advance of April Fools Day, CBS Morning News correspondent and satirist Mo Rocca met with the cast of […]

Richard Dawkins, the most famous “atheist” on the planet, has argued “the existence of God is a scientific hypothesis like any other.” 

Their paths were similar, but the outcomes were far from the same

There is no question that in many cases, we are cancer phobic, more afraid of the disease than the medical evidence says we need to be, and that fear alone can be bad for our health.

Postponed by the threat of hurricane Irene, the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial will open soon in Washington D.C. How is the leader’s dream interpreted by contemporary America?

Maybe the silver lining in the postponement of the King Memorial Dedication ceremony is the time it gives us to appreciate just how dangerous it was to be a civil […]

Public opinion about climate change, observes the New York Times’ Andrew Revkin, can be compared to “waves in a shallow pan,” easily tipped with “a lot of sloshing but not […]

This semester I am teaching a doctoral seminar on the important questions and trends related to media, technology and democracy. In this post, I introduce several major topics and provide […]

In a guest post today, Ashley Brosius a graduate student in my “Science, Environment, and the Media” course this semester discusses the need for greater focus on adaptation policy related […]

This semester at American University, the School of Communication has launched the inaugural Science in Society Film and Lecture series, an initiative designed to engage students, faculty, and the Washington, […]

Each state has its own state bird; why not a state movie? 

Glenn Beck’s appeal is that he makes it all look so easy. I mean, all you have to do is wave your American flag, pledge allegiance to God (the white […]

With Republicans gaining the majority in the House, closing the gap in the Senate, and controlling the state legislatures and Governor offices in key states such as Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, […]