Photo by World Economic Forum/FlickrShould a journalist be friends with the subject(s) of his or her reporting? The Columbia Journalism Review ponders the question in the wake of a weekend party hosted by Vice President Joe Biden. The gathering saw both White House staff and Washington ...

Many scientific studies have been so embraced by the media, they’ve become facts we often regard with, “Well, duh.” Consider bilingualism: It’s the full-proof edge! Hire a Spanish-speaking nanny! Pop in Rosetta Stone and double your salary!Despite it being an invaluable skill, it’d be ...

Tim White, PhD, LPC, NCC offers advice on family planning and parenting, LGBT issues, disability issues, education and work issues, relationships, ethics and "unusual" social issues. Send questions to Tim for future columns through his website.Hi Tim, Help! My daughter just turned 15. She's a ...

Social media reacts to the killing of Michael Brown.The ubiquity of social media and in particular, Twitter, has spawned hashtag activism which possesses both strong drawbacks and merits. On the one hand, online outrage is easy and the impact is iffy (often referred to as ‘slacktivism’). ...

The Disappearing Woman and Life on the InternetThis article originally appeared on TomDispatch.The Web is regularly hailed for its “openness” and that’s where the confusion begins, since “open” in no way means “equal.” While the Internet may create space for many voices, it also ...

The article below is reprinted with permission from the author and was originally published in the July/August 2012 issue of Orion.No one would want a novelist to perform brain surgery with his pen. No one would want zoologist to then write textbooks claiming those misadventures as best medical ...

If you’re the kind who ventures out on foot after dark, you’ve almost certainly noticed a hypnotic blue glow flashing inside windows throughout the neighborhood. And when you see people held captive by a box of moving light, you can’t help but think that humans seem complicit in their ...

Here’s a pretty distraction: a time-lapse video of Comet Lovejoy taken over South America’s Andes Mountains. As Kottke points out, it’s definitely worth watching through the last sequence.***“When the rallies happened in Tahrir Square,” wrote an Egyptian army officer in his personal ...

We at Utne Reader sift through 1,500 periodicals, skim hundreds of websites and blogs, and clamber over a mountain of new books to present the best the alternative press has to offer. Unfortunately, the magazine we deliver is only about 100 pages long, so we can’t reprint all of the fresh ...