Can rich Americans save the environment? Grassroots devotees may respond with an emphatic "no thanks" to the wealthy's meddling. After all, perhaps more than many other social movements in America, environmentalism is hands-on; people find rinsing out their bottles and breaking down their cardboard wonderfully empowering. More to the point, many people would argue that consumerism — which makes some people very rich — and environmentalism have irreconcilable differences. But if your gut reaction is to think that getting rich …

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I suspect the vast majority of Americans feel roughly the same about IQ tests. We believe they measure something worth measuring, but we're not sure what. We find broad, sweeping claims linking intelligence to ethnicity and race disturbing. Yet a new book on intelligence helps us understand what IQ tests measure-and their significance-and is not shy about discussing the IQs of various ethnic groups. Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count (W.W. Norton, hardcover, 282 pp. …

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Here are some statistics: in 2006, Latinos constituted 19% of America's school-age population; by 2025, 25% of students will be Latino; today, 48% of students in California are Latino. And here are some alarming trends: The vast majority of Latino students live in poor and dangerous neighborhoods, and are raised by parents who are the least-educated of any ethnic group, and speak little or no English. Here's a current book that addresses this situation: The Latino Education Crisis: The Consequences …

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Those tired of tired arguments about immigration will want to pick up David Fitzgerald’s A Nation of Emigrants. Fitzgerald — an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, San Diego — offers a study about immigration from the perspective of the country the immigrants left behind. This focus allows him to refreshingly avoid disingenuous claims that immigration helps Mexicans by giving them the jobs Americans don’t want, or arguments that race-bait those who dare speak out against illegal …

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The Keystone Kops, Charlie Chaplin, the Bathing Beauties-these American icons helped define early twentieth-century American popular culture. But where did they come from? And why did they appear when they did? A new study helps us understand the forces that converged to give us the pleasure of these spectacles. That a reader will learn about much more than the Keystone Film Company (Keystone) by reading The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture, by Rob …

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Barack Obama won big while refusing (for the most part) to go negative. Perhaps he won precisely because he refused to attack his opponent, to “pick on an invalid,” as Ronald Reagan—in an alarmingly effective slam—backhandedly did to Michael Dukakis in the George H.W. Bush–Dukakis election year of 1988. Certainly Obama succeeded, in part, because he responded (in his typically dignified manner) when he, himself, was targeted—something Dukakis, and John Kerry after him, tragically did not do. We might be …

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Like most Americans, I was taught that in passing the National Voting Rights Act of 1965, LBJ betrayed the South, and this region then folded itself, seemingly for good, into the arms of the GOP. So be it, was the Democrats’ response. Such, to their way of thinking, was the cross to bear for finally standing up to racist hicks. Yet, I could never quite reconcile this image of the racist South to my experience in the North, having grown …

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