Summary One day in 1968, Jane Elliott, a teacher in a small, all-white Iowa town, divided her third-grade class into blue-eyed and brown-eyed groups and gave them a daring lesson in discrimination. This is the story of that lesson, its lasting impact on the children, and its enduring power thirty years later. Elliott divided her [...]

Summary Slavery by Another Name is a 90-minute documentary that challenges one of Americans’ most cherished assumptions: the belief that slavery in this country ended with the Emancipation Proclamation. The film tells how even as chattel slavery came to an end in the South in 1865, thousands of African Americans were pulled back into forced [...]

Summary “I am dying. … There is no sense in trying to deny that fact,” 59-year-old Craig Ewert says of his rapid deterioration just months after being diagnosed with ALS, a motor neuron disorder often referred to as Lou Gehrig’s disease. “I’m not tired of living,” explains Ewert, a retired computer science professor. “I’m tired [...]

Summary Science writer Rita Carter tells the story of how modern neuroscience has revealed that reading, something most of us take for granted, unlocks remarkable powers. Carter explains how the classic novel Wuthering Heights allows us to step inside other minds and understand the world from different points of view, and she wonders whether the [...]

In the week since the death of Whitney Houston, a lot of things have transpired–the speculation over what led to her death, the Grammys, the public mourning of a music legend, the anguish felt by her daughter Bobbi Kristina, mother Cissy and other family and close friends, the speculations on whether ex-husband Bobby Brown would [...]

Summary Malcolm X (May 19, 1925 – February 21, 1965), born Malcolm Little and also known as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz[1] (Arabic: الحاجّ مالك الشباز‎), was an African American Muslim minister and human rights activist. To his admirers, he was a courageous advocate for the rights of African Americans, a man who indicted white America in [...]

Summary Whilst Ron Jones’ The Third Wave has received a lot of attention and been dramatised, George Muldoon’s experiments in capitalist democracy involving two groups of seventh graders in Mill Valley, California have seemingly slipped under the political radar… “I said years and years and years ago that the public school system is like a [...]

Summary The Arab is a one-dimensional caricature, a cartoon cutout used by film makers as stock villains and as comic relief. And so, over and over, we see Arabs in movies portrayed as buffoons, their only purpose being to deliver cheap laughs. This groundbreaking documentary dissects a slanderous aspect of cinematic history that has run [...]

Summary Sudan was the giant of Africa which once represented the greatest hope for peaceful coexistence between Arab and African, Muslim and Christian. That hope is all but gone. As Sudan is split into two, the government of Omar al-Bashir in the North faces growing public resentment over the loss of national pride. To boost [...]

Summary There has been a “drug culture” since the dawn of civilization. Sumerian cuneiform tablets from 3000 BC show a poppy harvest, as do ancient Egyptian scripts and Greek statues adorned with poppy crowns. Far more recently, Freud sung the praises of cocaine, which was included in the original recipe for Coca-Cola. But since the [...]

Summary In October 1969 hundreds of young people, clad in football helmets and wielding lead pipes, marched through an upscale Chicago shopping district, pummeling parked cars and smashing shop windows in their path. This was the first demonstration of the Weather Underground’s “Days of Rage.” Outraged by the Vietnam War and racism in America, the [...]

Summary In the early 1970s, Craig Haney, Curt Banks, Carlo Prescott, and Philip Zimbardo conducted a landmark situational study at Stanford University. The experiment tested the fundamental attribution error: our tendency to attribute causes of behavior to personal factors, underestimating the influence of situational conditions. For this study, a small group of college students volunteered [...]

Summary Marijuana: A Second Class Addiction (MASCA) sets out to investigate the popular misconception that marijuana is a non-addictive, non habit forming substance. Despite the fact that it is illegal, the ever-growing debate over whether marijuana should be legalized always tends to graze over one of the very fundamental questions of such a proposal – [...]

Summary On a cold December morning in 1919, just after midnight, Emma Goldman, her comrade Alexander Berkman, and more than 200 other foreign-born radicals were roused from their Ellis Island dormitory beds to begin their journey out of the United States for good. Convicted of obstructing the draft during World War I, Goldman’s expatriation came [...]

Summary The Green Apple. David Owen, a writer for The New Yorker, discusses the complex issues of sustainability as they relate to urban and suburban life. Green Manhattan, an article that Owen wrote for The New Yorker about the city’s inherent sustainability, was a major inspiration for the e² series. Green for All. Learn more [...]

Summary Surplus: Terrorized Into Being Consumers is an award winning Swedish documentary film on consumerism and globalization, created by director Erik Gandini and editor Johan Söderberg. It looks at the arguments for capitalism and technology, such as greater efficiency, more time and less work, and argues that these are not being fulfilled, and they never [...]

Summary Political philosopher and visionary, husband and father, dynamic orator and militant minister. In his lifetime, Malcolm X was many men. Born Malcolm Little, he later became “Detroit Red” and “New York Red” — a hustler, drug pusher, pimp, con man and the head of a Boston robbery ring. After spending time in prison, he [...]

Summary Jacques Ellul was a French theologian/sociologist and anarchist. He first became well-known to American readers when his book The Technological Society was published in English in 1964. This book leveled a broad critique of technique, a term that means more than gadgets and machines – as the English word technology means. For Ellul, technique [...]

Summary On a trip to visit family in Seoul in April, I was approached by a man and a woman who claimed to be North Korean defectors. They presented me with a DVD that recently came into their possession and asked me to translate it. They also asked me to post the completed film on [...]

Summary There’s a world wide revolution going on.. it goes beyond Mississippi, it goes beyond Alabama, it goes beyond Harlem.. What is it revolting against? The power structure. The American power structure? No. The French power structure? No. The English power structure? No. Then what power structure? An international western power structure. Malcolm X: Prince [...]

Summary Released in 1968, “Black on Black” has been hailed for its pioneering effort to capture the voices and experiences of black America during one of the most volatile times in the nation’s history. Black on Black won six major awards, including the Edward R. Murrow Award for “distinguished television reporting and best documentary”; the [...]

Summary Have US counter-terrorism policies contributed to the deadly crisis in the Horn of Africa? The worst drought in 60 years has thrown some 13 million people across the Horn of Africa into crisis. In Somalia, ravaged by two decades of conflict, the consequences have been disastrous. For over six months, aid agencies on the [...]

Summary “It’s impossible not to remember the bombshell Forum press conference that autumn Thursday, and, like the JFK assassination or Challenger explosion, where we were when we heard it. “The Announcement” shows what happened behind the scenes: how Johnson learned of his illness, the anxiety over telling family and teammates and the fallout that occurred [...]