Styrofoam faces smiled facetiously. Lauren wanted to say that she knew all along and that she was just kidding too and that she was just being stupid or funny or both, but she just giggled along with them as her cheeks melted. She didn’t know what was going on, but she quickly concluded that these girls were much more experienced in life than she was.

The rage soldiers feel after a roadside bomb explodes, killing or maiming their comrades, is easily directed to innocent civilians who are seen to support the insurgents. It is a short psychological leap, but a massive moral leap. It is a leap from killing – the shooting of someone who has the capacity to do you harm – to murder – the deadly assault against someone who cannot harm you. The war in Iraq is now primarily about murder. There is very little killing.

Targeted by insurgent groups, denied help from the US army, the Iraqis who cast their lot with America are being kidnapped and executed every day, and no news report or televised pleas of help have caused a stir in the American conscience.

“It’s nice to be naughty,” claims the buxom hotty in a certain widely disseminated ad for True.com, one of online dating’s biggest players. It’s the sort of oxymoronic sentiment that encapsulates, at least in spirit, the seemingly two-faced practices of a company that has been
raising the hackles of its competitors in an industry struggling with stagnant revenues.

“When I was a boy,” Donat said, “I was afraid of falling into the sky. And you? Were you ever afraid of falling into the sky?” I made no reply. The idea was absurd. No one falls into the sky, and surely even as a child I had sense enough not to fear such a thing.

It took a while before I gathered that jazz was… actually a form of resistance. Nowadays I realize that jazz is no different from Jihad. As much as jazz, the classical music of America, has been a call for freedom, America is not a free place anymore.

She always had someone: the strongest one, the man who had slaughtered the most animals. Now the man who had killed the most barren cows slept by her side with his white skin that sparkled by her brown body. He held her in his dreams.

Harper’s attempt to portray himself as environmentally conscious is all the more insulting considering his track record. Harper’s “greening” is nothing more than a whitewash.

As America’s major media companies pressure the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to allow for more cross-ownership, Eric Klinenberg examines how media consolidation is suffocating democracy and even putting people’s lives at risk.

Reacting to 300, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took advantage of his Iranian New Year’s address to talk about Hollywood’s campaign of “psychological warfare” against his country. Perhaps he didn’t realize that we’ve been fighting that campaign against ourselves for some time now.