Political provocateur Bill Maher tells it like it is in a useful and hilarious guide for the many Americans who want to do more here at home to help the war effort, but are at a loss as to what. Thirty-three dynamic new posters and several classics from our government’s archive, accompanied by text from one of our leading pundits and cutting-edge comedians make this the perfect book for this time in our nation’s history, the zeitgeist of one-year-post-9/11 America. This is the book that will help Americans make the connections between what we do and how it can help our troops and ourselves. Having always defined political correctness as the elevation of sensitivity over truth, and being an optimist, I guessed that after 9/11, Americans would judge all matters "’ to be an indulgence herewith unaffordable. Boy, was I wrong."

As we think and talk, rich arrays of mental spaces and connections between them are constructed unconsciously. Conceptual integration of mental spaces leads to new meaning, global insight, and compressions useful for memory and creativity. A powerful aspect of conceptual integration networks is the dynamic emergence of novel structure in all areas of human life (science, religion, art, ...). The emergence of complex metaphors creates our conceptualization of time. The same operations play a role in material culture generally. Technology evolves to produce cultural human artefacts such as watches, gauges, compasses, airplane cockpit displays, with structure specifically designed to match conceptual inputs and integrate with them into stable blended frames of perception and action that can be memorized, learned by new generations, and thus culturally transmitted.

Critical humorists and religion are steeped in a long-standing cultural antagonism. This book recounts the dramatic skirmishes between religion--its dogma and edicts, political manifestations, and the nature of faith--and the satire, parody, jokes and hyperbole of popular wits. The writings of Twain, Vonnegut, Mencken and Hitchens are included, along with the films of Monty Python, the cartoons of Charlie Hebdo, the animated television series The Simpsons and South Park, the comedy of George Carlin and Bill Maher, the music of Randy Newman and Pussy Riot, the performance monologue of Julia Sweeney and the magic of Penn Jillette.

Armed with a 10-point list of dating criteria, skin-tight jeans, and flash cards on Nascar, football, and micro-breweries, she enlists everyone in sight to set her up on blind dates in a passionate quest to meet just one really great guy. Names are changed to protect the rejected as she humorously dishes dot-com hunks, rappers manques, and tattooed graduates of the Gene Simmons School of Dating. Bridget Jones would be proud of her American cousin. Elizabeth chronicles her true-life dating spree set off by the broken engagement as a marriage-minded mortician in her mid-30's.

By placing facts within their institutional context, this book uncovers the intricate connections between the military/economic alliance in America and the resulting globalization of poverty. Using the depth of the sociological imagination, the author provides a picture of reality that is often overlooked by journalists and commentators who routinely report facts detached from their sociological roots. "M. Asadi's essay on the United States war in Iraq is both passionate in its commitment to human rights and rich in its use of data. It draws skillfully on C. Wright Mills and other scholars to paint a devastating portrait of the war, but also to reflect profoundly on the policies of the United States and their human consequences all over the world." Howard Zinn Author of, A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES Nominated for the, C. Wright Mills Award of the Society for the Study of Social Problems.

An e-journal including articles by Oxford anthropologist, Walter Armbrust and popular Muslim TV preacher, Amr Khaled, as well as an interview with Ruby, the controversial Egyptian pop idol. Each issue features a special theme and features articles commissioned by some of the Arabic and non-Arabic media world's leading figures.

In this illuminating book, David S. Silverman assesses four controversial television programs from the perspective of media history, assessing the censorship present at all four networks and the political and intellectual inertia it produces in broadcast television. Beginning with The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in the sixties, the author also examines The Richard Pryor Show, TV Nation, and Politically Incorrect. Drawing on firsthand accounts by the writers, producers, and performers of these programs, Silverman offers an unbiased view of the ways in which censorship, sponsor intimidation, regulation, and network tampering force all American broadcasters to manipulate creative talent and stifle genuine controversy. Shedding new light on the prevalence of censorship in broadcast television, this book reinvigorates the subject of free speech in American society.

The hilarious and controversial host of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher has written his funniest, most opinionated, and most necessary book ever—a brilliantly astute and acerbically funny vivisection of American life, politics, and culture. Some of the smartest commentary about what’s happening in America is coming from a comedian—this comedian being Bill Maher. If you want to understand what’s wrong with this country, it turns out that one of the best informed and most thought-provoking analysts is this very funny pothead. The book was inspired by the “editorial” Bill delivers at the end of each episode of Real Time. These editorials are direct-to-camera sermons about culture, politics, and what’s happening in the world. To put this book together, Maher reviewed more than a decade of his editorials, rewriting, reimagining, and updating them, and adding new material to speak exactly to the moment we’re in. Free speech, cops, drugs, race, religion, the generations, cancel culture, the parties, the media, show biz, romance, health—Maher covers it all. The result is a hugely entertaining work of commentary about American culture in the tradition of Mark Twain, Will Rogers, and H. L. Mencken.

Trained relentlessly to work and consume, we make daily lifestyle decisions that promote corporate profits more than our own well-being. We also find ourselves working more, living in fragmented communities, and neglecting our most basic spiritual and political values. As Curtis White puts it, “In order to live, you will be asked to do what is no good, what is absurd, trivial, demeaning, and soul killing.” Although we belong to the world’s most affluent society, somehow we never have the chance to ask: How shall we live? With his trademark humor and acerbic wit, White raises this impertinent question. He also debunks the conventional view that liberalism can answer it without drawing on spiritual values. Surveying American popular culture (including Office Space and The Da Vinci Code) to illustrate his points, White urges us to renew our commitment to “human fundamentals” as articulated by Henry David Thoreau-especially free time, home, and food-and to reclaim Thoreau’s spirit of disobedience. Seeking imaginative answers to his central questions, White also interviews John De Graaf (Affluenza), James Howard Kunstler (The Long Emergency) and Michael Ableman (Fields of Plenty) about their views of the good life in our time.