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Rhetorical Contents xvii
Preface xxi
Introduction: How to Read and Write Critically 1
What Is Critical Thinking? 1
Why Read Critically? 2
How to Read Critically 3
Now Cut That Out! 3
John Leo 3
Keep a Journal on What You Read 4
Annotate What You Read 6
Outline What You Read 9
Summarize What You Read 10
Question What You Read 11
Analyze What You Read 13
What Is Critical Thinking? 21
Developing Ideas 22
Brainstorming 22
Narrowing the Topic 25
Identifying Your Audience 25
Developing a Thesis 25
Understanding Your Paper’s Objective 26
Researching 27
Selecting Sources for Your Paper 27
Documenting Sources 28
Organizing Your Paper 28
Drafting Your Essay 28
Writing Your Introduction 28
Developing Paragraphs and Making Transitions 29
Concluding Well 31
Editing and Revising 32
Using Active Voice 32
Grammar and Punctuation 33
Proofreading Effectively 33
Approaching Visuals Critically 34
Images and Advertising 35
Altoids Ad 36
Deciphering Editorial Cartoons 38
Graduation Cartoon 39
CHAPTER: 1 Fashion and Flesh: The Images We Project 41
What I Think About the Fashion World 43
Liz Jones
“We decided to publish two covers for the same edition [of Marie Claire]–one
featuring Sophie Dahl, a size 12; the other, Pamela Anderson, a minute size
6–and we asked readers to choose. . . . You would think that we had declared war.”
Culture Shock: Get Real Ad 49
Out-of-Body Image 50
Caroline Heldman
“What would disappear from our lives if we stopped seeing ourselves as objects?
Painful high heels? Body hatred? Constant dieting? Liposuction? It’s hard to know.”
The Natural Beauty Myth 54
Garance Franke-Ruta
“Only in America do we think that beauty is a purely natural attribute, rather than
a type of artistry requiring effort.”
My Hips, My Caderas 57
Alisa Valdes
“In Spanish, the word for hips is caderas–a broad term used to denote everything
a real woman carries from her waist to her thighs, and the bigger, the better.
In English, hips are something women try to be rid of.”
Weight of the World 61
Niranjana Iyer
“In India, I’d been above average in height. In the States, I was short (so said
the Gap). From a tall, thin Women’s, I had morphed into a petite, plump
Misses’–without gaining or losing a smidgen of flesh.”
How Men Really Feel About Their Bodies 63
Ted Spiker
“I’m not the only man who wishes his body looked more like Michael Jordan’s
and less like a vat of pudding.”
Culture Shock: Mr. Olympia 67
Never Too Buff 68
John Cloud
“New studies reveal that something awful has happened to American men over
the past few decades. They have become obsessed with their bodies.”
Why I Rue My Tattoo 73
Beth Janes
“A few months [after I got my tattoo], I started seeing girls everywhere
with them. My plan had backfired. Not only might people get the wrong
idea about me, they might actually get the worst idea: that I was yet another
too-trendy girl who thought tattoos were just, like, so cool.”
Tattoo Me Again and Again 75
Stephanie Dolgoff
“But like I’ve never regretted having my twin girls, I’ve never regretted
getting my tats or looked back and thought, What was I thinking?”
Perspectives: Dress to Please 78
CHAPTER: 2 Consumer Nation: Wanting It, Selling It 79
Targeting a New World 81
Joseph Turow
With budgets that add up to hundreds of billions of dollars, the advertising
industry exceeds the church and the school in the ability to promote images about
our place in society–where we belong, why, and how we should act.
Will Your Recession Be Tall, Grande, or Venti? 86
Daniel Gross
“I propose the Starbucks theory of international economics. The higher the
concentration of expensive, nautically themed, faux-Italian-branded Frappuccino
joints in a country’s financial capital, the more likely the country is to have
suffered catastrophic financial losses.”
Just a Little Princess? 89
Peggy Orenstein
“Diana may be dead and Masako disgraced, but here in America, we are in the
midst of a royal moment. To call princesses a ‘trend’ among girls is like calling
Harry Potter a book.”
Perspectives: Vital Signs 100
Culture Shock: A Portfolio of Advertisements
Gap
Boys and Girls Clubs
Skechers
M&M’s
Kenneth Cole
Apple iPod Nano
Honda
United Colors of Bennetton
Which One of These Sneakers Is Me? 101
Douglas Rushkoff
“I was in one of those sports ‘superstores’ the other day, hoping to find a pair of trainers
for myself. As I faced the giant wall of shoes, I noticed a young boy standing next
to me, maybe 13 years old, in even greater awe of the towering selection of footwear.
His jaw was dropped and his eyes were glazed over–a psycho-physical response to
the overwhelming sensory data in a self-contained consumer environment.”
The Allure of Luxury 107
James B. Twitchell
“We’ve developed a powerful desire to associate with recognized objects of little
intrinsic but high positional value. . . . “Luxury for all” is an oxymoron, all right, the
aspirational goal of modern culture, and the death knell of the real thing.”
With These Words, I Can Sell You Anything 112
William Lutz
“Advertisers use weasel words to appear to be making a claim for a product
when in fact they are making no claim at all.”
The Language of Advertising 123
Charles A. O’Neill
“At best, we view advertising as distracting. At worst, we view it as dangerous
to our health and a pernicious threat to our social values.”
CHAPTER: 3 Generation Debt: The Financial Challenges
We Face 133
Generation Debt 135
Anna Kamenetz
“Young people are falling behind first of all because of money. College tuition
has grown faster than inflation for three decades, and faster than family income
for the past fifteen years. Even as the price has risen, more young people than
ever aspire to college. Yet the inadequacy of aid shoots down their hopes.”
Grow Up? Not So Fast 140
Lev Grossman
“Today there is a new, intermediate phase along the way [between adolescence
and adulthood]. The years from 18 until 25 and even beyond have become a
distinct and separate life stage . . . in which people stall for a few extra years,
putting off the iron cage of adult responsibility that constantly threatens to crash
down on them. They’re betwixt and between. You could call them twixters.”
Culture Shock: Boomerang Statistics 151
Maxed Out 153
James D. Scurlock
“As they carried [her son] Sean’s belongings across campus, [his mother] noticed
a number of tables advertising credit cards. ‘But I didn’t worry,’ she recalls. ‘Sean
was 18, he didn’t have a job. Who would give him a credit card?’ Not only would
they give him a credit card, they would practically shove it down his throat.”
Strapped 156
Tamara Draut
“About a quarter of students report using their credit cards to pay for tuition and
books. What about the other three quarters? Visa and MasterCard have no doubt
funded a great many pizzas, kegs, and spring breaks. The problem is that after graduation,
the need for credit often morphs into a whole new category: survival debt.”
Debtor’s Prism 161
Margaret Atwood
“The hidden metaphors [of debt] are revealing: We get ‘into’ debt, as if into a
prison, swamp, or well, or possibly a bed; we get ‘out’ of it, as if coming into the
open air or climbing out of a hole. If we are ‘overwhelmed’ by debt, the image is
possibly that of a foundering ship, with the sea and the waves pouring inexorably
in on top of us as we flail and choke.”
Investigating the Nation’s Exploding Credit Squeeze 166
Danny Schechter
“There is a credit divide in America that fuels our economic divide. Put another
way, the globalization of our economy is about more than the outsourcing of jobs.
There is a deeper shift underway from a society based around production, with
the factory as the symbol of American economic prowess, to a culture driven by
consumption, with the mall as its dominant icon.”
Perspectives: Empty-nesters 171
Twentysomething: Be Responsible, Go Back Home
After College 172
Ryan Healy
“When you look closely, it is glaringly apparent that moving back in
with parents is one of the most responsible things a new college grad can
do. By sucking it up at home for a year or two, young people give themselves
the opportunity to take control of their career, take control of their
finances, and transition from the care-free college fantasy world to the
real-world of work, marriage, kids, mortgages, and car payments.”
The “Responsible” Child 174
Florinda Vasquez
“I‘m not sure letting [college graduates] back into the nest really does help.
I tend to think that moving back home after college has a lot more advantages
for the child than the parents. [And] if the parent is encouraging the
child to return home, I wonder if that speaks more to the parent’s needs
than what’s best for the young-adult child in the long run.”
CHAPTER: 4 Carbon Footprints: It’s Not Easy Being Green 179
Nobel Lecture on Global Warming 181
Al Gore
“The earth has a fever. And the fever is rising. The experts have told us it is not a
passing affliction that will heal by itself. We asked for a second opinion. And a
third. And a fourth. And the consistent conclusion, restated with increasing alarm,
is that something basic is wrong. We are what is wrong, and we must make it
right.”
Culture Shock: Earth’s Before and After Pics 188
Global Warming: Who Loses–and Who Wins? 190
Gregg Easterbrook
“To date, the greenhouse-effect debate has been largely carried out in abstractions–
arguments about the distant past (what do those 100,000-year-old ice cores in
Greenland really tell us about ancient temperatures, anyway?) coupled with
computer-model conjecture regarding the twenty-second century with the occasional
Hollywood disaster movie thrown in.”
Culture Shock: The House We All Build 201
Big Foot 202
Michael Specter
“A person’s carbon footprint is simply a measure of his contribution to global
warming. (CO2 is the best known of the gases that trap heat in the atmosphere,
but others–including water vapor, methane, and nitrous oxide–also play a role.)
Virtually every human activity–from watching television to buying a quart of
milk–has some carbon cost associated with it.”
Six Products, Six Carbon Footprints 215
Jeffrey Ball
“Here’s a number that will help you put all those carbon footprints in perspective. The
U.S. emits the equivalent of about 118 pounds of carbon dioxide per resident every
day, a figure that includes emissions from industry. Annually, that’s nearly 20 metric
tons per American–about five times the number per citizen of the world at large.”
Perspectives: It’s Not Easy Being Green! 224
My Carbon Footprint: A Documentary, a Daughter,
and All That Is Dear 225
Jennifer Davidson
“Recently I had the opportunity to watch Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, documenting
the state of Earth’s global-warming condition due to greenhouse gases. Educated
as a scientist, I appreciated the wealth of hard data Gore had compiled, but what
brought me to weep, as if I had lost someone I loved, was the manner in which he
gave meaning to the data. Everything I love, everything that is dear to me, is at stake.”
Are Cows Worse than Cars? 228
Ben Adler
“Now should be environmental vegetarianism’s big moment. Global warming
is the single biggest threat to the health of the planet, and meat consumption
plays a bigger role in greenhouse-gas emissions than even many
environmentalists realize.”
Can Cities Save the Planet? 235
Witold Rybczynski
In cities, people can walk rather than drive. They share more resources and
take up less space. Is living in a city a more ecofriendly choice than living
amongst rural pastures?
CHAPTER: 5 Look at Me!: Celebrity and Our Fifteen Minutes
of Fame 239
The Culture of Celebrity 241
Joseph Epstein
“Celebrity at this moment in America is epidemic, and it’s spreading fast, sometimes
seeming as if nearly everyone has got it. Television provides celebrity
dance contests, celebrities take part in reality shows, perfumes carry the names
not merely of designers but of actors and singers. Without celebrities, whole sections
of the New York Times and the Washington Post would have to close down.”
Death to the Film Critics! Hail the CelebCult! 252
Roger Ebert
“The CelebCult virus is eating our culture alive, and newspapers voluntarily expose
themselves to it. It teaches shabby values to young people, festers unwholesome
curiosity, violates privacy, and is indifferent to meaningful achievement.”
Perspectives: Public Library 256
Return of the Brainless Hussies 257
Rebecca Traister
“To hear media watchdogs tell it, dumbness–authentic or put on–is rampant in
pop-culture products being consumed by kids; it gets transmitted through their
downy skin and into their bloodstreams through the books and magazines they
read, the television they watch, the trends they analyze like stock reports, and the
celebrities they aspire to be.”
Mirror, Mirror, on the Web 264
Lakshmi Chaudry
“We now live in the era of micro-celebrity, which offers endless opportunities to celebrate
that most special person in your life, i.e., you–who not coincidentally is also
Time magazine’s widely derided Person of the Year for 2006. An honor once reserved
for world leaders, pop icons, and high-profile CEOs now belongs to ‘you’.”
Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism 271
Christine Rosen
“Today, our self-portraits are democratic and digital; they are crafted from pixels
rather than paint. On social networking websites like MySpace and Facebook our
modern self-portraits invite viewers not merely to look at, but to respond to the
life online.”
Crafting Your Image for Your 1,000 Friends on Facebook 279
Stuart Wolpert
“Relationships now may be more fleeting and more distant. People are relating to
others trying to promote themselves and seeing how you compare with them.
People are comparing themselves against idealized self-presentations.”
The Case for Reality TV 284
Michael Hirschorn
“The current boom may be a product of the changing economics of the television
business, but reality TV is also the liveliest genre on the set right now.
It has engaged hot-button cultural issues–class, sex, race–that respectable
television, including the august CBS Evening News, rarely touches.”
Reality TV: Should We Really Watch? 288
Elizabeth Larkin
“These reality TV shows wouldn’t be made if we didn’t watch them, so
why do we watch them? Either we find them entertaining or we find them
so shocking that we are simply unable to turn away. I’m not sure that the
latter is an entirely defensible reason for supporting such programming;
turning away is as easy as hitting a button on the remote control.”
The Strange Life and Impending Death of Jade Goody 292
Meredith Blacke
Did Jade Goody’s decision to air her life–and death–in front of the cameras
take reality television too far?
CHAPTER: 6 Perspectives on Gender: Bridging the Gap 297
My Most Attractive Adversary 299
Madeleine Begun Kane
“Despite our progress in the battle against workplace discrimination, the fact of
being a female is almost always an issue. It may not be blatant, but it usually lurks
just below the surface. We are not lawyers, executives, and managers. We are female
lawyers, female executives, and female managers.”
Perspectives: What She Wore 302
Has Male Bashing Gone Too Far? 303
Jake Brennan
“The backlash against male domination in our society has reached the point
where we expect a father in a sitcom or TV commercial to be an oafish, grunting
Neanderthal, as in Tim Allen’s famous caricature of the “typical” male. Take the
male leads in Everybody Loves Raymond or The King of Queens, for example:
blundering nitwits, most of the time.”
The New Girl Order 307
Kay S. Hymowitz
“Carrie Bradshaw is alive and well and living in Warsaw. Well, not just Warsaw.
Today you can find her in cities across Europe, Asia, and North America. Seek
out the trendy shoe stores in Shanghai, Berlin, Singapore, Seoul, and Dublin, and
you’ll see crowds of single young females (SYFs) in their twenties and thirties,
who spend their hours working their abs and their careers, sipping cocktails,
dancing at clubs, and (yawn) talking about relationships.”
The Men We Carry in Our Minds 316
Scott Russell Sanders
“When the women I met at college thought about the joys and privileges of men,
they did not carry in their minds the sort of men I had known in my childhood.”
The Science of Difference 320
Steven Pinker
“The belief, still popular among some academics (particularly outside the biological
sciences), that children are born unisex and are molded into male and female
roles by their parents and society, is becoming less credible.”
Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes 326
Byron Hurt
“When you think about American society, the notion of violent masculinity is at
the heart of American identity.” From the outlaw cowboy in American history to
the hypermasculine thug of gangster rap, violent masculinity is an enduring symbol
of American manhood itself.”
Culture Shock: 50 Cent 329
He’s a Laker; She’s a “Looker” 330
Jennifer L. Knight and Traci A. Giuliano
“Coverage of women’s sport is inferior to that of men’s not only in quantity
but in quality. Sport commentators and writers often allude or explicitly
refer to a female athlete’s attractiveness, emotionality, femininity, and
heterosexuality (all of which effectively convey to the audience that her
stereotypical gender role is more salient than her athletic role).”
VIEWPOINTS
Why Men Don’t Watch Women’s Sports 337
Graham Hays
Why don’t men tune into women’s sports? The author has a few ideas.
Gender Inequality 339
E. M. Swift
“Look, Title IX was needed in 1972. And it worked brilliantly. But the
world has changed. Thank God and Title IX. But because of Title IX’s
unintended consequences, in 2006 the law is causing more harm than
good. Women’s sports are no longer on life support. They can be taken
off the endangered-species list.”
Culture Shock: Annika Sorenstam Has Another Remarkable
Year For A Lady 344
CHAPTER: 7 Race and Racism: Can We Be Color-Blind? 347
Inequality, Race, and Remedy 349
Alan Jenkins
“We cannot solve the problem of poverty–or, indeed, be the country that we aspire
to be–unless we honestly unravel the complex and continuing connection between
poverty and race.”
Leaving Race Behind 355
Amitai Etzioni
“Racial characterizations have trumped the achievement ideal; people born into a
nonwhite race, whatever their accomplishments have been unable to change their
racial status. Worse, race has often been their most defining characteristic, affecting
most, if not all, aspects of their being.”
People Like Us 366
David Brooks
“Maybe it’s time to admit the obvious. We don’t really care about diversity all
that much in America, even though we talk about it a great deal. What I have seen
all around the country is people making strenuous efforts to group themselves
with people who are basically like themselves.”
Perspectives: History Marches On 372
Are You a Terrorist, or Do You Play One on TV? 373
Laura Fokkena
“Racial profiling and ethnic stereotyping are nothing new to Americans of Middle
Eastern descent. Hollywood has long used images of bumbling, accented Arabs
and Iranians as shorthand for ‘vile enemy’.”
Culture Shock: Which Man Looks Guilty? 378
Why I’m Black, Not African American 379
John H. McWhorter
“We need a way of sounding those notes with a term that, first, makes some sense and,
second, does not insult the actual African Americans taking their place in our country.”
Black vs. “Black” 381
Gary Kamiya
“People whose race or ethnicity defines their identity, or at least makes up a major
part of it, are what I think of as quotation-mark people. They are not only mixedrace,
they are “mixed-race.”
Our Biracial President 387
James Hannaham
“Obama has cleared a path for fairness. . . . Still, privilege is no Death Star, and
one Luke Skywalker can’t obliterate it with a couple of lasers, no matter how
well-placed. It did not vaporize last night, so in the Obama presidency we can
look forward to some amusing and possibly infuriating contretemps that will arise
from an African-American family leading the country.”
The End of White America? 391
Hua Hsu
“Today, the picture is far more complex. To take the most obvious example,
whiteness is no longer a precondition for entry into the highest levels
of public office. The son of Indian immigrants doesn’t have to become
‘white’ in order to be elected governor of Louisiana. A half-Kenyan, half-
Kansan politician can self-identify as black and be elected president of the
United States.”
The End of the Black American Narrative 399
Charles Johnson
“My point is not that black Americans don’t have social and cultural
problems in 2008. But these are problems based more on the inequities
of class. It simply is no longer the case that the essence of black American
life is racial victimization and disenfranchisement, a curse and a condemnation,
a destiny based on color in which the meaning of one’s life is
thinghood, created even before one is born.”
CHAPTER: 8 The American University System: Still Making
the Grade? 409
How to Get a College Education 411
Jeffrey Hart
“I launched into an impromptu oral quiz. Could anyone (in that class of 25 students)
say anything about the Mayflower Compact. . . . The Magna Carta? The
VIEWPOINTS
Spanish Armada? The Battle of Yorktown? The Bull Moose party? Don Giovanni?
William James? The Tenth Amendment? Zero. Zilch. Forget it.”
A’s for Everyone! 417
Alicia C. Shepard
“Many students believe that simply working hard–though not necessarily doing
excellent work–entitles them to an A. ‘I can’t tell you how many times I’ve
heard a student dispute a grade, not on the basis of in-class performance . . . but
on the basis of how hard they tried’.”
Culture Shock: The College Track Onward and Upward 424
The Disadvantages of an Elite Education 427
William Deresiewicz
“When students get to college, they hear a couple of speeches telling them to ask
the big questions, and when they graduate, they hear a couple more speeches
telling them to ask the big questions. And in between, they spend four years taking
courses that train them to ask the little questions–specialized courses, taught
by specialized professors, aimed at specialized students.”
Higher Ed, Inc. 437
James Twitchell
“Elite schools are no longer in the traditional education business. . . . What they
offer just one more thing that you shop for, one more thing you consume, one
more story you tell and are told. It’s no accident that you hear students talking
about how much the degree costs and how much it’s worth.”
Just Let Go Already 449
Joe Queenan
Are helicopter parents too connected to their college-age offspring? This writer
thinks so, but that doesn’t keep him from calling his kids daily.
Welcome to the Fun-Free University 453
David Weigel
“College students will drink, despair, play loose with hygiene, make dirty
jokes. Before in loco parentis made its comeback, they were thriving.
Meanwhile, the changes that really worried academics in the 1970–
demands for new disciplines, shrinking core curricula–are settling into
permanence.”
Animal House at 30: O Bluto, Where Art Thou? 460
Eric Hoover
“Animal House, the most infamous movie ever made about college, first hit
theaters in the summer of 1978. Since then it has inspired three decades of
big-screen imitations soaked in booze, rebellion, and sophomoric gags. It
remains a keg of cultural references.”
Perspectives: Binge Drinking 468
CHAPTER: 9 Domestic Affairs: The Family in Flux 469
Family: Idea, Institution, and Controversy 471
Betty G. Farrell
“Fundamental changes in the expectations, meanings, and practices defining American
family life have characterized much of the twentieth century. . . . Consequently,
concern about the family has moved to the center of the political arena.”
Perspectives: The New American Family 480
Numbers Drop for the Married-with-Children 481
Blaine Harden
“As marriage with children becomes an exception rather than the norm, social scientists
say it is also becoming the self-selected province of the college-educated
and the affluent.”
Culture Shock: Marriage Trends in the United States 489
On Not Saying “I Do” 490
Dorian Solot
“Share my life with this wonderful man, absolutely. But walk down the aisle and
exchange rings–the tradition baffles me. I didn’t expect my small refusal to matter
much to anyone. But I have quickly learned that in a society in which
90 percent of people get married sometime in their lives, lacking the desire to do
so appears in the ‘barely acceptable’ category.”
Five Non-Religious Arguments for Marriage 493
Dennis Prager
“Words matter. They deeply affect us and others. Living with your ‘boyfriend’
is not the same as living with your ‘husband.’ . . . Likewise, when you introduce
that person as your wife or husband to people, you are making a far
more important statement of that person’s role in your life than you are with
any other title.”
For Better, For Worse 496
Stephanie Coontz
“[A]lthough some people hope to turn back the tide by promoting traditional
values, making divorce harder, or outlawing gay marriage, they are having to confront
a startling irony: The very factors that have made marriage more satisfying
in modern times have also made it more optional.”
Did I Miss Something? 500
Lowell Putnam
“Growing up in a ‘broken home,’ I am always shocked to be treated as a victim of
some social disease. . . . ‘The divorce of my parents’ . . . has either saturated every
last pore of my developmental epidermis to a point where I cannot sense it or has
not affected me at all.”
How Getting Married Made Me an Activist 505
David Jeffers
“In October 2008, when it looked like the gay marriage ban was winning
support here in my home state, I turned to my partner of 7 years and told
him we’d better say ‘I do’ before California voters told us “you can’t.”
Less Shouting, More Talking 509
Richard Mouw
“As an evangelical, I subscribe to the ‘traditional’ definition of a marriage,
and I do not want to see the definition changed. Does that mean I want to
impose my personal convictions on the broader population? No. I celebrate
the fact that we live in a pluralistic society, with many different worldviews
and lifestyles.”
Why I’m Not Getting Married . . . Again 510
David Shneer
“I recoiled at the suggestion that my husband and I should come to California
to get married. ‘We’ve been married for 12 years.’ ‘Yeah, I know David,
but it’s legal now. You can take advantage of all of the benefits.”
Credits 515
Index 521\n
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