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Light Polarized, Pored Over

Global Villager

An Interview With Pico Iyer

America the notion is still very different from America the nation. What’s touching and almost regenerative is that, whatever is happening in the real America — where the murder rate is worse than Lebanon’s, and there is homelessness and poverty — America is still a shorthand throughout the world for everything that is young and modern and free. One interesting thing is that Mick Jagger, the Beatles, Reebok, pizza, enchiladas — everything that is hip and desirable — are all regarded as American no matter what their true origins.

Holiday Offer

The Guitar Showing My Age

Thirteen

I ’m kneeling in the foyer lacing my sister’s boot when I hear my mom muttering in the hallway. This time it’s not about the shoes in the living room or my father’s late child support. She’s talking about me. “Thirteen,” she says, “and you think you’re all grown up.”

School’s Out

An Interview With John Taylor Gatto

The first thing I discovered was that the types of learning that are measured by standardized tests are not real learning at all. To do well on a standardized reading test, for example, does not mean that you read well. There are approximately 150 categories of information that a complex passage of reading delivers, and the standardized test covers approximately six of those categories over and over again.

Never Let Me Down

He wanted me to know about the great and wild people he had met, the music he had heard, the crazy underworld places he had been. He needed to explain that, while being a junkie sounded bad to other people, it had been really wonderful for him.

Friend Of The Sun

Sunbeams

Everything that has a beginning has an ending. Make your peace with that and all will be well.

Buddha

The Trouble With Religion

An Interview With Matthew Fox

If you teach people that the number-one problem is their sin and that when they came into the world they made a blotch on existence, they’ll never get over it. We talk about sexual abuse of children, but this is religious abuse.