It has become a liberal truism that Muslim Americans would not want to vote for the party of the administration responsible for the violation of their civil liberties, but—surprise —Muslim Republicans exist. Columbia Political Science Professor Robert Shapiro notes that these assumptions are rooted in liberal attitudes, rather than an analysis of voting trends and the motives behind them.

Western media coverage of the conflict in Kenya has been enormous, especially for a story coming out of Africa. The reportage has been a staple of the Economist and the New York Times since the beginning of the year, and even the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette has run the AP’s dispatches from Nairobi.

The pose is almost menacing. Two penetrating, steel-blue eyes gaze downward at the viewer, the mouth calm but clenched. Russian president Vladimir Putin, Time’s 2007 Person of the Year, projects a threatening image in the magazine’s cover shot. The same could be said about Russia’s current image in the West.

Rampant apathy and cynicism. Growing civic disengagement. Hedonistic individualism. These accusations have often been leveled at our generation of students. The lack of traditional engagement by the 18-24-year-old cohort has been seen as the end of student activism. But these criticisms are blind to the diversity and subtle power of the student action happening today.

I didn’t get into college on my first try. I came from a good high school, made National Honor Society, and was class president. I also had pretty unimpressive grades, and got suspended from school my senior year. I was a mixed candidate, to be sure. Too self-assured to listen to anyone, bored senseless by class, and more than a little lazy, it’s probably a good thing that I wasn’t cool enough to drink or do drugs. But I was certainly cocky; I applied early to MIT and assumed that I’d get in. More accurately, it didn’t even occur to me that I wouldn’t get in.

Having directed Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005) and having served as the Consulting Producer for Who Killed the Electric Car? (2006) and Executive Producer for No End in Sight (2007), Alex Gibney has found a formula to refresh the politico-documentary genre and penetrate Hollywood’s mainstream distribution.

Borges, Cervantes, Neruda, García Márquez—these were the canonical legends of Hispanic literature whom I expected to encounter in my Introduction to Hispanic Cultures course last fall. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the expected books were almost entirely absent from our syllabus. In lieu of these Spanish and Latin American authors, the class focused on works by the likes of Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Néstor García Canclini, and Edward Said.

Rendition presents the subject of torture through an aching love story that encourages the viewer to suffer along with the wife of the disappeared, wondering when love will be restored and family made whole.

The issue of academic tenure has been a persistent catalyst for academic disputes. Proponents of tenure claim that it preserves academic freedoms on campuses, whereas opponents refer to the stagnation of research and publications that may occur once tenure is granted.

The US Congress recently attempted to pass a law officially recognizing Turkish genocide of Armenians. Backed by more than half the members of the House, the bill called upon the Turkish government to acknowledge the Ottoman Empire’s role in committing atrocities against its Armenian population from 1915 to 1924. Yet the motion was ultimately quashed. As a New York Times editorial put it, “Historical truths must be established through dispassionate research and debate, not legislation.” In other words, history, like religion, is not something the state should be institutionalizing.

Candide, Canterbury Tales, and The Arabian Nights were all once deemed “obscene” by the federal government.

In late April 2004, the news that American soldiers had abused detainees at Abu Ghraib prison arrived to the public in a string of shocking photos. The images that exposed the torture of prisoners were brutal and strange—and they were memorable, resistant to amnesia. On May 24, President Bush made a somber address about the news. He called the abuse “disgraceful conduct by a few American troops, who dishonored our country and disregarded our values”—seedless, atypical, un-American. The story of our response to torture at Abu Ghraib is also the story of our unbelief in that declaration.

If you are what you eat, then America is corn. It’s in just about everything we eat: soda, ketchup, English muffins, breakfast cereal, cookies, crackers, ice cream, BBQ sauce… hell, even cough syrup. It feeds the cattle that go into your hamburger. And now it’s going into our gas tanks as ethanol.

In the coming years, will we see environmental preservation as a new approach of state policy directed at preventing and resolving conflict?

In an effort to recast himself as a “compassionate conservative,” President Bush often invokes HIV/AIDS relief as a key component of his foreign policy. Amid a history of strong-armed diplomacy, this altruistic endeavor is distinct. Launched during the 2003 State of the Union, “The President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief” (PEPFAR) garnered rousing bipartisan applause and was awarded legislative authorization just three months later. At $15 billion in funding, PEPFAR shattered records as the largest commitment by any nation to focus on a single disease.