Society & Culture

Katrina came into our office, a downtown Los Angeles skyrise, nervously smiling, nodding her head in respect as she passed the attorneys behind each desk. She was led to the center office, a fishbowl of glass...

Hippo Reads is proud to be working with Oxford University Press to highlight unmissable excerpts from recent and upcoming titles. Today’s post is reprinted from Who Rules the Earth?: How Social Rules Shape...

As an American woman living in Los Angeles, I’d rarely heard about and knew next to nothing about Female Genital Mutilation (FGM)—it simply wasn’t in my sphere of awareness. But I assumed it was an...

In some ways heirlooms become possible (as a concept) only because of the industrialization and standardization of agriculture. They went away, there was a cultural and agricultural break, placing temporal and practical distance between current generations and past foods. In the meantime, gardeners and farmers quietly saved seeds for their own use.

“Thursday Is Bakalao’s Day!” at Work and Play “Working musician” is an oxymoron in U.S. society because, musicians’ work is strongly identified with leisure and fun. Unlike waiters, bartenders, cooks, cleaning staff, or security guards, musicians look like they are having fun when they work. How much of this outward appearance is a genuine enjoyment of their music making and how much of it is performative affect, a mask that they wear to appeal to audiences? It is telling that the English word for what musicians do is play, not work.

Our faces are stretching. Taking a step forward takes up all our strength. We cling on to the rock walls to pull ourselves forward. We are at one of the edges of the Indian Ocean at the southern tip of...

Contesting the USA Patriot Act Just months after the release of the U.S. Senate report on torture, the precarious balance between national security and civil liberties has made headlines once again. This...