Bringing the same care to her prose that she brought to her Booker Prize-winning novel The God of Small Things, Roy discusses the need for social movements to contest the occupation of Iraq and the reduction of "democracy" to elections with no meaningful alternatives allowed. She explores the dangers of the "NGO-ization of resistance," shows how governments that block nonviolent dissent in fact encourage terrorism, and examines the role of the corporate media in marginalizing oppositional voices.

    Rowling's popular character, Severus Snape, and the roles he played in the Harry Potter series.

    One - now the minority - functions in a print-based, literate world that can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth. The other - the majority - is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic. To this majority - which crosses social class lines, though the poor are overwhelmingly affected - presidential debate and political rhetoric is pitched at a sixth-grade reading level. In this “other America,” serious film and theater, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins of society. In the tradition of Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, Pulitzer Prize-winner Chris Hedges navigates this culture - attending WWF contests, the Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas, and Ivy League graduation ceremonies - to expose an age of terrifying decline and heightened self-delusion.

    His reporting about Enron’s bankruptcy and the controversy surrounding it was being used by NPR, he was hot on the trail of a possible connection to an Army Secretary, and he was one of the few reporters granted an interview with Enron President Jeff Skilling. And then it all came crashing down.When Salon was forced to take down Leopold’s article about Army Secretary Thomas E. White’s role in the Enron bankruptcy, his world began to unravel. Ostracized from the mainstream media, slipping into a deep depression, with no prospects on the horizon, Jason Leopold was forced to start from scratch.News Junkie is Jason’s story, an addict to the core, he traded an early life of drugs and crime for the equally addictive world of breaking news. From the top of the reporting world to its dregs and back again, Leopold takes us on a journey through some of the biggest events of the recent past, all the while letting us into his inner struggles.With an unforgettable array of characters, from weepy editors and love-starved politicos to steroid-pumped mobsters who intimidate the author into selling drugs and stolen goods, News Junkie shows how a man once fueled by raging fear and self-hatred transforms his life, regenerated by love, sobriety and a new, harmonious career with the media.

    In these pages, you will find the most provocative, compelling, tragic, and triumphant moments in sports from 2007, captured by the knights of the keyboard who make sports come alive for us day after day, week after week, year after year. Here you’ll find Paul Solotaroff’s excellent and uncompromising take on the neglect that a growing number of crippled NFL players continually face from the NFL players’ union. Jeanne Marie Laskas’s “G-L-O-R-Y!” offers a rousing inside look at the pregame rituals of the Cincinnati Bengals cheerleaders. A riveting online diary by Wright Thompson reveals a bleak and merciless landscape in China, which that country’s government would rather not have the world see during preparations for the Olympics. Nack finds a place for the fascinating offbeat story as well as the sensational. Alongside Eli Saslow’s captivating article about an obscure seventeenth-century sport, similar to a giant rugby scrum, carried out in the streets of Kirkwall, Scotland, stands Franz Lidz’s “scoop of the year,” a controversial and rare look into the life of George Steinbrenner, baseball’s largest but recently most enigmatic figure. This year’s collection marks another wonderful addition to “one of the most consistently satisfying titles in the Best American series” (Booklist).Contributors include Scott Price, Rick Bragg, Gary Smith, J.R. Moehringer, and others.

    Herman and Noam Chomsky show that, contrary to the usual image of the news media as cantankerous, obstinate, and ubiquitous in their search for truth and defense of justice, in their actual practice they defend the economic, social, and political agendas of the privileged groups that dominate domestic society, the state, and the global order.Based on a series of case studies—including the media’s dichotomous treatment of “worthy” versus “unworthy” victims, “legitimizing” and “meaningless” Third World elections, and devastating critiques of media coverage of the U.S. wars against Indochina—Herman and Chomsky draw on decades of criticism and research to propose a Propaganda Model to explain the media’s behavior and performance. Their new introduction updates the Propaganda Model and the earlier case studies, and it discusses several other applications. These include the manner in which the media covered the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement and subsequent Mexican financial meltdown of 1994-1995, the media’s handling of the protests against the World Trade Organization, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund in 1999 and 2000, and the media’s treatment of the chemical industry and its regulation. What emerges from this work is a powerful assessment of how propagandistic the U.S. mass media are, how they systematically fail to live up to their self-image as providers of the kind of information that people need to make sense of the world, and how we can understand their function in a radically new way.

    In this multifarious underground, Pynchonesque misfits rant and rave, fans eulogize, hobbyists obsess. Together they form a low-tech publishing network of extraordinary richness and variety. Welcome to the realm of zines.In this, the first comprehensive study of zine publishing, Stephen Duncombe describes their origins in early-twentieth-century science fiction cults, their more proximate roots in 60s counter-culture and their rapid proliferation in the wake of punk rock. While Notes from Underground pays full due to the political importance of zines as a vital web of popular culture, it also notes the shortcomings of their utopian and escapist outlook in achieving fundamental social change. Duncombe’s book raises the larger questionof whether it is possible to rebel culturally within a consumer society that eats up cultural rebellion.Packed with extracts and illustrations from a wide array of publications, past and present, Notes from Underground is the first book to explore the full range of zine culture and provides a definitive portrait of the contemporary underground in all its splendor and misery.

    Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

    Translation of: Orphee noir, originally published 1948 as the preface to Anthologie de la nouvelle poesie negre et malgache de langue francaise, edited by Leopold Sedar Senghor.

    The classic account of modern British journalism, now updated and re-issued.

    In this eloquent, persuasive book, Neil Postman alerts us to the real and present dangers of this state of affairs, and offers compelling suggestions as to how to withstand the media onslaught. Before we hand over politics, education, religion, and journalism to the show business demands of the television age, we must recognize the ways in which the media shape our lives and the ways we can, in turn, shape them to serve out highest goals.

    Picking up where his hilarious Screen Burn left off, Dawn of the Dumb collects the best of Charlie Brooker's recent TV writing, together with uproarious spleen-venting diatribes on a range of non-televisual subjects - tackling everything from David Cameron to human hair. Rude, unhinged, outrageous, and above all funny, Dawn of the Dumb is essential reading for anyone with a brain and a spinal cord. And hands for turning the pages.

    A return to the timeless wisdom that has made his first bestseller, Harvey Penick's Little Red Book, a modern classic, The Game for a Lifetime does not contain the technical swing tips and stance aids of today's instructional guides, but dispenses a philosophy on golf, and on life. Harvey Penick knew that the teachings in his book would stand the test of time, and he spent his lifetime pursuing and enjoying all that the game has to offer—physically, emotionally, and spiritually. The Game for a Lifetime, the final book by Harvey Penick, stands as a wonderful testimonial to this legendary career, his celebrated teaching style, and his ability to affect the lives of the people who had the good fortune to know him.

    Wearing a saddle.... But worse than this was when the proprietor exclaimed to a cheering crowd, “We are taking the dinosaurs back from the evolutionists!” He knew then and there it was time to try and salvage the Land of the Enlightened, buried somewhere in this new Home of the Uninformed.With his razor-sharp wit and erudite reasoning, Pierce delivers a gut-wrenching, side-splitting lament about the glorification of ignorance in the United States, and how a country founded on intellectual curiosity has somehow deteriorated into a nation of simpletons more apt to vote for an American Idol contestant than a presidential candidate.With Idiot America, Pierce's thunderous denunciation is also a secret call to action, as he hopes that somehow, being intelligent will stop being a stigma, and that pinheads will once again be pitied, not celebrated.

    Aware, however, that it was a long and difficult book, he resolved to compile a more concise and accessible version of his ideas on the interpretation of dreams. That shorter work is reprinted here. Since its publication, generations of readers and students have turned to this volume for an authoritative and coherent account of Freud's theory of dreams as distorted wish fulfillment.After contrasting the scientific and popular views of dreams, Freud illustrates the ways in which dreams can be shown to have been influenced by the activities or thoughts of the preceding day. He considers the effect on dreams of such mental mechanisms as condensation, dramatization, displacement, and regard for intelligibility. In addition, the author offers perceptive insights into repression, the three classes of dreams, and censorship within the dream.Students and psychologists will welcome this inexpensive edition of an always-relevant work by the father of modern psychoanalysis. This volume will also appeal to anyone interested in dreams of the workings of the unconscious mind.