1. Family and Memory.
Robert Hayden, "Those Winter Sundays" (poetry). Gary Soto, "One Last Time." E.B. White, "Once More to the Lake." Maxine Hong Kingston, "No Name Woman." Alice Walker, "Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self." Raymond Carver, "My Father's Life." Sherman Alexie, "The Unauthorized Autobiography of Me."Fiction: Harlan Coben, "The Key to My Father."
Focus: How Has Divorce Redefined the Family?
Stephanie Coontz, "Putting Divorce in Perspective." Judith Wallerstein, "The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce." Jane Smiley, "There They Go, Bad-Mouthing Divorce Again."
2. Issues in Education.
Lynda Barry, "The Sanctuary of School. " John Holt, "School Is Bad for Children." Daniel H. Pink, "School's Out." Maya Angelou, "Graduation." David W. Murray, "The War against Testing." Leslie S.P. Brown, "Who Cares about the Renaissance?" Diane Ravitch, "Literature: Forgetting the Tradition." Christina Hoff Sommers, "For More Balance on Campus."Fiction: Edward P. Jones, "The First Day."
Focus: Do We Still Need Affirmative Action?
Linda Chavez, "Remembering the Negative Side of Affirmative Action." *Goodwin Liu, "The Myth and Math of Affirmative Action." Richard Harwood, "Debating without Facts."
3. The Politics of Language.
Richard Rodriguez, "Aria" Louise Erdrich, "Two Languages in Mind, but Just One in the Heart." Frederick Douglass, "Learning to Read and Write." Malcolm X, "A Homemade Education." Barbara Lawrence, "Four-Letter Words Can Hurt You." Amy Tan, "Mother Tongue." Jonathan Kozol, "The Human Cost of an Illiterate Society." Aldous Huxley, "Propaganda under a Dictatorship." George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language."
Focus: How Free Should Free Speech Be?
Stanley Fish, "The Free-Speech Follies." Tim Robbins, "A Chill Wind is Blowing in This Nation." Stuart Taylor, Jr., "It's Time to Junk the Double Standard on Free Speech."
4. Media and Society.
Neil Postman, "Informing Ourselves to Death." Marie Winn, "Television: The Plug-In Drug." Wendy Kaminer: "Testifying: Television." Salman Rushdie, "Reality TV: A Dearth of Talent and the Death of Morality." Neal Gabler, "The World Still Watches America." David Bradley, "The Movie That Changed My Life." Jann S. Wenner, "Why the Record Industry Is in Trouble." James Fallows, "Who Shot Mohammed al-Dura?"
Focus: Does Media Violence Hurt?
George Gerbner, "Global Media Mayhem." Richard Rhodes, "Hollow Claims about Fantasy Violence." John Leo, "When Life Imitates Video."
5. The Way We Live Now.
William Wordsworth, "The World Is Too Much with Us" (poetry). Richard Florida, "The Transformation of Everyday Life." Edward J. Blakely and Mary Gail Snyder, "Putting up the Gates." Umberto Eco, "How Not to Use the Cellular Phone." Anna Quindlen, "Barbie at 35." Ellen Ruppel Shell, "The Boredom Effect." Greg Critser, "Supersize Me." Geert Lovink, "Sweet Erosions of Email." James B. Twitchell, "Lead Us into Temptation." Michelle Lee, "The Fashion Victim's Ten Commandments."
Focus (photo essay): What Do Our Clothes Tell Us about Ourselves? 6. Gender and Identity.
Marge Piercy, "Barbie Doll" (poetry). Sharon Olds, "Rite of Passage" (poetry). Scott Russell Sanders, "The Men We Carry in Our Minds." Judy Brady, "Why I Want a Wife." Glenn Sacks, "Stay-at-Home Dads." Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris, "The True Clash of Civilizations." Robyn Blumner, "Title IX: Gender Equality in College Sports." Alleen Pace Nilson, "Sexism in English: Embodiment and Language." Deborah Tannen, "Marked Women."
Focus: Who Has It Harder, Women or Men?
Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, "The Girls of Gen X." Christina Hoff Sommers, "The War against Boys." Warren Farrell, "Man Bashing."
7. The American Dream.
Chief Seattle, "We May Be Brothers." Alexis de Tocqueville, "Why the Americans Are So Restless in the Midst of Their Prosperity." Richard Wright, "The Library Card." Dinesh DSouza, "Becoming American." Judith Ortiz Cofer, "The Myth of the Latin Woman: I Just Met a Girl Named Maria." Brent Staples, "Just Walk On By." Lars Eighner, "On Dumpster Diving." Fiction: Amy Tan, "Two Kinds."
Focus: What is the American Dream?
Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence. Emma Lazarus, "The New Colossus." (poetry) John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address. Martin Luther King, Jr., "I Have a Dream."
8. Why We Work.
Arlie Hochschild, "The Second Shift." Andrew Curry, "Why We Work." Virginia Woolf, "Professions for Women." Eric Schlosser, "Behind the Counter." Barbara Ehrenreich, "Selling in Minnesota." Paul Fussell, "Deliverers." Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "Delusions of Grandeur." Suzanne Gordon, "What Nurses Stand For." William Kittredge, "Owning It All."Fiction: Jamaica Kincaid, "Girl."
Focus: What is a Living Wage?
Manning Marable, "The Politics of Inequality." Tom Jehn, "Harvard, Do the Right Thing." Bruce Bartlett, "The Employment Effects of Living Wage Laws."
9. Medicine and Human Values.
Austin Bunn, "The Bittersweet Science." Margaret Sanger, "The Turbid Ebb and Flow of Misery." Abraham Verghese, "The Metaphor of Blight." Anna Mae Halgrim Seaver, "My World Now." Dylan Thomas, "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" (poetry). Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, "On the Fear of Death." Phillip Longman, "The Health of Nations."
Focus: What is Happening to Medical Care?
Shannon Brownlee, "The Overtreated American." Kara M. Nakisbendi, "Doctor Takes Her Own Advice." Mona Charen, "Malpractice: By Lawyer."
10. Making Choices.
Robert Frost, "The Road Not Taken" (poetry). Linda Pastan, "Ethics" (poetry). Annie Dillard, "The Deer at Providencia." George Orwell, "Shooting an Elephant." Henry David Thoreau, "Civil Disobedience." Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from Birmingham Jail." Garrett Hardin, "Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against 'Aid' That Harms." Claire McCarthy, "Dog Lab." Stanley Milgram, "The Perils of Obedience." Andrew Sullivan, "What's So Bad about Hate." Fiction: Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas."
Focus: Can We Be Both Free and Safe?
Eric Foner, "The Most Patriotic Act." Richard A. Posner, "Security versus Civil Liberties." Declan McCullagh, "Why Liberty Suffers in Wartime."
Credits.
Index.
