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The Onion has issued an apology for the following tweet, which has since been taken: Nine-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis was in the running last night for the Best Actress Oscar. Though she lost out to Jennifer Lawrence and her performance in Silver…

Going Clear by Lawrence Wright is largely a history of both the Church of Scientology and the one and only L. Ron Hubbard, its eccentric and obtuse founder. It also explores the membership of some of Scientology’s most well-known followers, like…

The New York Time's January 6 late edition led off with “From Spy to Source to Convict,” a story by reporter Scott Shane about former-CIA operative John Kiriakou, who Friday will begin to serve a 30-month prison sentence for being “the first current…

Much like the travesty of me and Hitch, my newfound hero of journalism and intelligent conversation, I hadn't known anything about the late David Foster Wallace before his death (by hanging, in 2008). I hadn't read any of his novels, and admittedly,…

To review a book about Africa while knowing very little of Africa is at once a gift and a curse. My response, both in writing and in thought, is by default, limited in breadth and in depth; I happen to be suspended at a distance better suited for…

Prior to Dwarf: A Memoir, the only book I ever bothered to read about “little people” was The Hobbit. Unlike The Hobbit, Dwarf is not epic medieval fantasy, nor is it about hobbits or “actual” dwarves, neither of which exist ... I think. It’s rather…

The first book I reviewed for PolicyMic was America, You Sexy Bitch (AYSB) by conservative Meghan McCain and liberal Michael Ian Black. Politically at odds with each other, the Senator’s daughter and the stand-up comedian take a road trip across the…

A- [Puns are almost completely unavoidable when discussing a book about vaginas, so please bear with me — and pardon any accidental (and purely coincidental) misspellings of “come”.] When I was in elementary school (before I could figure out my…

Intelligence Squared US (IQ2 US), an English import, was founded in 2006 by Robert Rosenkranz, a philanthropist and CEO (of Delphi Financial Group), with the goal of providing a forum for “intelligent discussion, grounded in facts and informed by…

A- Last May, well before I started reviewing books for PolicyMic, Oxford University Press published Defending Politics: Why Democracy Matters in the Twenty-First Century by Matthew Flinders, a politics professor at the University of Sheffield. I…

Arnold Schwarzenegger was one of my favorite people growing up. There was a point in my childhood when I thought Terminator 2 was the greatest movie ever; I remember riding an invisible motorcycle, spraying spit all over as I tried to inadequately…

In an appealing 381-page package that reads like 80 pages, legendary investigative journalist Bob Woodward narrates the political fighting over federal spending and tax policy, as well as the controversial (mis) management of the U.S. economy, by…

In the wake of all the deadly, Anti-American protests across the Middle East allegedly in response to the Nakoula Basseley Nakoula’s film Innocence of Muslims, French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo has today decided to place its stamp on the…

A+ In many ways, ours is the Age of Assholes. Before we know it, we millennials will be marching into our 30s, and more and more of the people we’ve been raising up to celebrity status in recent years, (the high profile role models we’ve created)…

Editor's Note: This story contains some explicit language that may offend readers. "Rampant feminist" Cindy Gallop is on a mission: to change the way people view sex in America. (Actually she’s also trying to change the way people have sex in…

Former Republican Party insider Mike Lofgren's The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted (Penguin, 2012), is an admirable effort because, right from the get-go and all throughout, it…

For a while, I had been looking for an excuse to focus my Relevant Reads series on Scapegoat: A History of Blaming Other People by Charlie Campbell (Overlook, 2011) — my favorite book, like, ever.  Beyond what the whole title…

Last Friday, PolicyMic pundit Lena Kheir wrote a spirited opinion piece that argues against arming women with guns for the purpose of preventing sexual assault. Her piece is a reaction to safety awareness expert Paxton Quigley’s interview with The…

Grade: B The inspiration behind Celebrity Society (Routledge 2012), Professor Robert van Krieken’s analysis of society and its relationship with the handful of people it chooses to celebrate, coincides with its justification, and both are summed up…