John Jackson, Hustle and Show
Sudhir Venkatesh’s ethnography of Chicago gangs meets Hollywood

Luke Freeman, Anthropology Unites Mankind Rather Than Dividing It
Understanding cultural differences as key to the future

Nicholas Kristof, The Sex Speech
What would the perfect meld of Obama/Hillary have said about sexism in the US?

Shankar Vedantam, What Obama Might Learn from Emily Dickinson
Crime, poverty and vengeance mixed into one

Shankar Vedantam, See No Bias
Implicit bias trumps explicit ideology—or even the best-intentioned can have prejudices

Lisa Margonelli, Tapped Out
Review of Bottlemania, and why Americans spend $11 billion on bottled water

Maureen Flynn-Burhoe, Memory Work: Colonialism, Control, Civilization
Donna Haraway and the politics of nature

Maureen Flynn-Burhoe, Civil Society: Rousseau (1753) and Locke (1690)
The TV hit series Lost and the Enlightenment philosophers

NPR, Spanglish: A New American Language
“Spanglish is a creative way also of saying, ‘I am an American and I have my own style, my own taste, my own tongue’.”

Luis Sierra, Spanglish Is the New Ad Lingo
Spanglish and our hybrid identities

Svend Brinkmann, Changing Psychologies in the Transition from Industrial to Consumer Societies
Abstract for a 2008 article in the History of the Human Sciences— psychoanalysis and behaviourism as psychologies of industrial society, social constructionism for consumer society

Deric Bownds, A New Perspective on Culture-Specific Behavior
Japanese vs. Americans—an institutional approach as an alternative to the cultural psychology approach

Joana B., A Book in the Making: “How Does Culture Matter”
Offering an effective alternative to how anthropology can comment the peddling of that one “big idea” to explain everything

ScienceNews, In Britain, The Last Neanderthal Was More Advanced Than the First Homo Sapien
Flourishing technology and command of the landscape…

Dan Vergano, The Mystery Story of the Maya Slowly Reveals New Twists
Not quite as sudden a collapse, and much more: the rewards of patient research

Cynthia Van Gilder, Everything I Ever Really Needed to Know I Learned in Anthropology Class
Life and learning lessons from anthropology

Dan Bilefsky, Albanian Custom Fades: Woman as Family Man
In Albanian, women could become men to lead their family. Also see Greg’s comment over at Culture Matters.

Kerim, The Myth of Cultural Miscommunication
“Treating the military’s lack of respect for local cultural knowledge as a cultural problem which can be solved by hiring anthropologists ignores the very real ways in which the military itself operates as a system for producing knowledge about the world”

Open Anthropology, Two Ways of Doing Anthropology, Maybe a Third, and Still Losing
Getting at our biases towards research, plus some great poetry from Suheir Hammad