Cultures tend to encourage conformity. They fail to see the growth of society and population health is attained through diversity of mind and body. Family trees with limited branches don’t thrive (see the Hapsburgs). Our daughters must learn to sculpt their minds and appreciate their bodies.

A few nights ago I watched Palestinian folkloric dance and theatre performed by the Ibdaa dance troupe. The group is the third generation of dancers, consisting of ten boys and ten girls from the Dheisheh refugee camp in the West Bank.

At eleven o’clock on any weekday morning, Rancho El Camino, an equestrian academy, training and boarding facility, is an oasis of hooves, hay and calm amid the alarmingly overdeveloped and still-overdeveloping rolling hills just east of Del Mar.

Sometimes an artist dies who has burrowed so deeply into our consciousness, we feel more than a tangible sense of loss; we feel pain...August Wilson gave me – and countless others – this gift of elemental insight. He challenged my conceptions of sports, the Black athletic experience, and how to understand these two aspects so central to our popular culture... Thank goodness we can cherish the body of work he left us.

Even though I would not call myself a "conservative," I have a great deal of respect for people who honestly hold well-thought-out conservative opinions... It must be disheartening to many conservatives to see the press give so much attention to self-proclaimed conservative "spokespersons," who once they open their mouths reveal themselves to be complete dunderheads.

Edge of Sports brings to you our annual hoops award ceremony, the 2004-05 Micheal Rays. These awards are first and foremost a response to the numbingly predictable trophies handed out by the NBA.

It's a perfect marriage," bleated DC City Council member Vincent Orange. He was not talking about Charles and Camilla, although the marriage in question is equally ugly.

On the recent second anniversary of the Iraq War, I was driving along Interstate 95 in the early afternoon, somewhere outside Bangor, Maine, when a cherry red SUV pulled into my lane.

WHEN Tamara and Fiona Baur returned from Cuba last summer, several people asked why the solidarity brigade that they had worked with was called Olga Benario.

The blues can rightfully be called the fountainhead of 20th Century pop music, out of which flowed jazz, swing, bop, rock, and – yes – country and western.

The first thing you notice in Capitol Hill Arts Center's production of "Waiting for Lefty" is the guy in a brown suit and felt hat lying on the floor of the theater, a tin cup by his side.

Thank the gods for the faux Christian Right! One of their hate groups, Focus on the Family, has uncovered a sinister [left wing?] plot to corrupt America’s youth.

Pablo Neruda has inspired the left cultural movements internationally. His mark cannot be underestimated.

In "The Swan" and "Extreme Makeover," women undergo plastic surgery and public humiliation on TV in a supposed effort to feel better about themselves. It is the merchandising of self-worth and a big prime-time lie.

Vote online for Fahrenheit 9/11 for Favorite Film for the People's Choice Awards.

"Thanksgiving" has come and gone. Let’s look at last week’s news and views, some of it at any rate, to see who should be thankful for what. David Brooks, the ultra right op-eder for the New York Times was thankful for "Globalization" which he thinks is reducing global poverty.

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MANY commentators have argued that the information revolution currently underway is as momentous a phenomenon as the industrial revolution. The latter was an integral part of the capitalist social formation, which represented a fundamental change in the way that society was structured the world over. It is difficult to see the information revolution as a part of any such fundamental structural change or as a harbinger of a new mode of production.

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The late poet Allen Ginsberg, who was a teacher and friend, knew that issues of media and language were crucial to our prospects for building a real and humane democracy in America. Allen was an avid reader of the alternative press, and an enthusiastic supporter of the group, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.

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It is good, at certain hours of the day and night, to look closely at the world of objects at rest. Wheels that have crossed long, dusty distances with their mineral and vegetable burdens, sacks from the coal bins, barrels, and baskets, handles and hafts for the carpenter’s tool chest.

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