Last month, InTheFray asked readers to respond to a few questions about America’s cult of excess. Sixty-four percent of you think we are just going to keep getting fatter and fatter, 55 percent of you think the media’s coverage of Tsunami relief donations is distracting attention from victims of the disaster, 100 percent of you are well supplied with electronic gadgets, but not plasma TVs, thank God, and 45 percent of you think the divide between a CEO and minimum wage worker is greater than that between an American and a citizen from a developing nation. What harmony if we could just get rid of the CEOs …

This month, paradoxically, we examine excess through the eyes of writers pushing limits. We start with three experiences abroad in which Americans are defy their own expectations. Chris Verrill, in an excerpt from his travel biography Is For Good Men To Do Nothing, breaks his rule of not giving to panhandlers while walking the streets of Nairobi. Geoff Craig unknowingly does battle with tradition while breaking for target practice in Yemen. And columnist Afi-Odelia E. Scruggs learns a lesson from Senegalese eye shadow practices.  

Back in the United States, our comfortable assumptions are challenged when Kai Ma investigates the national debate over legalizing sex work, columnist Russ Cobb questions the liberalization of the ivory tower, and Claire McKinney reviews Sonia Shah’s Crude: The Story of Oil, which will make you feel much worse than you already did about driving.

Finally, artist Aliene de Souza Howell paints and writes about the 1979 Ku Klux Klan massacre of five Communist Workers Party members while police stood by. If something like this could happen in 1979, we should be very worried about 2005.

Later this month, on February 21, Pearl Gabel shares her seesaw life as a constant dieter, proving that excess has two poles. Which one do you live at?

Nicole Leistikow
Managing Editor
Baltimore, Maryland

Coming Up

In March: ITF celebrates women’s history month by sharing stories of gender-bending.
In April: The meaning of Belonging.

Nicole Leistikow

The 2004 election results gave voice to an influential 22 percent minority of “moral values” voters, mostly folks against gay marriage. But what are the moral values of other minorities? We at InTheFray thought the year wouldn’t be complete without an exploration of the rarely heard views of a few other groups.

We begin with queers. American Indians have long been under- or misrepresented in mainstream U.S. culture, and queer Indians even more so. Emily Alpert investigates how the Two-Spirit movement has grown over the last 10 years in Rainbow and red. Meanwhile, Park Slope tribe member Keely Savoie, in her debut column, explores how Democrats sold out gays following the election.

On the subject of sex, we turn to Editor Laura Nathan’s interview with porn star and feminist-activist Christi Lake, who has some startling views about her job and the media’s representation of it. Writer Eric Duncan reveals what it is like to go through life being called “‘Sugar,’ ‘Peaches,’ ‘Hon,’ ‘Miss,’ ‘Sweet Thing,’ ‘Girl,’ and ‘Little Lady, ’” in Propositions, a fictional tale of a waitress who resents being treated like a sex object, and then decides to oblige.

Next, we make a quick stop at the Amazon.com Theater, as columnist Afi Scruggs returns to ITF with a Christmas critique of the megalith’s latest marketing ploy. Then we escape from all things commercial, as photographer Tewfic El-Sawy shares a fabulous photo essay centered on the Delhi shrine of Sufi Saint Nizzamuddin. Think mystical love of God, combined with a devotion to the poor on earth. It’s a combination that very well could put you in the proper holiday spirit.

Nicole Leistikow
Managing Editor
Baltimore, Maryland

Coming mid-December:
Don’t forget to vote for your favorite pieces of the past year in our annual BEST OF ITF Survey!
Also, Jairus Grove’s review of Cornell West’s new book Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism.

Nicole Leistikow

Presidential elections always demand a degree of individual and collective introspection, ranging from questions of policymaking, patriotism, and citizenship to the utility (or futility) of indirect elections and grassroots political activism. For the candidates, the media, activists on the street, and even InTheFray readers, this election season has proven to be no exception to — and, at times, an exaggeration of — this political rule.

In this issue of InTheFray, we examine the many faces of democracy and the subject that has dominated the news, dinner conversations, and rallies of all varieties throughout the United States — and across much of the world — since at least last spring: the 2004 U.S. presidential election. While InTheFray Assistant Editor Michelle Chen discloses how her trip to China inspired unexpected patriotism in The other half, our literary channel, IMAGINE, borrows a chapter from Opio Sokoni’s Making struggle sexy to elucidate how the American criminal justice system thrives on institutional racism and classism to fill prisons.

Looking beyond the policymaking and cultural concerns of the election, InTheFray moves Inside the beltway, outside politics to explore the deliberations of a traditionally apathetic U.S. citizen, Marna Bunger over whether she and millions of other undecided — and often uninspired — voters can make their votes count in what many have termed “the most important election of our lives.” In Clout concerns, meanwhile, Christopher White takes a look at another angle of the democratic process: the struggle of College Republicans to help their party win the election one college student at a time — with GOP support that is far from five-star quality.

Of course, given that the 2000 election shook so many people’s faith in the electoral process, it’s worth asking whether politics as usual — with thousands of new voters thrown into the mix — can restore faith in the democratic process this year. To answer this question, InTheFray Editor Laura Nathan takes Salman Rushdie’s Step Across This Line Off the Shelf to make sense of this election — and the American democratic process — from a non-native’s perspective in Where the two elections shall meet. While the answers may not be written in stone, this month’s book club selection just may hold the keys to American democracy’s creative potential or prove that progress is off-limits.

There’s only one way to find out. So don’t just sit there. Get out and read — er, vote.

Laura Nathan
InTheFray Editor
Brooklyn, New York

Laura Nathan-Garner

As the leaves turn and the United States waits to see if the new season will also bring a new president, this month’s issue of ITF brings you stories of change, both resisted and embraced, from far and wide.

Beginning in Vietnam, Uzi Ashkenazi explores through photography the everyday traditional practices that  persistalong the Red River — despite the destruction brought by war and industry. Halfway around the globe in Nicaragua, the plight of tradition is more grim, as Anthony Vaccaro shows the violence wrought in a battle between indigenous peoples and Mestizo farmers for precious rainforest land in Who owns the forest?. In Colombia, where customs are maintained even in the face of fear and lawlessness, love makes a gringo, Andrew Blackwell, contributor to our Through the Looking Glass travel channel, play along.

Meanwhile, somewhere in a Middle Eastern county torn by armed struggle, a doctor and his family find their loyalties under fire. In her short story, How we live and die, Lise Strom autopsies the betrayal of the medical profession, of family and friends, and of morals that happens in wartime.

Back on U.S. soil, Patsi Bale Cox examines a different war — one waged by feminists against their detractors over the raising of boys — in her essay Our sons. And in a special follow-up to last month’s photo essay A good day for Grant, parent Geoff Lanham writes about newly explained challenges he faces in raising his son.

Finally, we look at current developments in this nation’s politics as columnist Henry Belanger bemoans the sad compromises required by the media’s devotion to “balance.” Later this month, on October 18, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and InTheFray advisory board member Bob Keeler will put in his two cents on the upcoming election, while ITF Contributing Writer Jairus Victor Grove reviews Rebecca Carroll’s book Saving the Race: Conversations on Du Bois From a Collective Memoir of Souls, which explores how our changed society looks at Du Bois’ work today.

The final wisdom on change? Let’s end with Churchill’s dictum: “There is nothing wrong with change, if it is in the right direction.” Happy voting.

Nicole Leistikow
Managing Editor
Baltimore, Maryland

Nicole Leistikow

Think World War II concentration camps. Think Cambodian killing fields. Now think Rwandan genocide. In this week’s special issue on coping, University of Chicago sociology PhD candidate Rachel Rinaldo‘s story Genocide’s deadly residue details the courageous life of one survivor and the various ways in which Rwanda and its citizens are coping with orphaned children, a high HIV rate among women survivors, and an uncertain justice system — amongst other grave concerns — following the traumatic aftermath of the mass killings of April 1994.

Meanwhile, as we reflect on the Rwandan genocide, ITF Contributing Writer Jairus Victor Grove takes philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy’s book War, Evil and the End of History OFF THE SHELF and asks why some atrocities make headlines, while others, such as the unfolding genocide in the Sudan, are left in the dark in Sudan and the wars that history left behind.

But you don’t have to cross U.S. borders to uncover unenviable battles and admirable stories of perseverence. Other courageous tales of coping come from people like Hildie Block, who writes about the slow onslaught of multiple sclerosis — the same disease that killed her father — in her essay The specter, and Marley Seaman, who describes a close college friend’s struggles with his chemotherapy treatments in Stealing his veins. Meanwhile, a young boy diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) just tries to make it through the day in Sun-A Kim‘s photo essay A good day for Grant: Living with ADHD.  For a fictional look at coping, check out ITF Contributing Editor Sierra Prasada Millman‘s review of The Pearl Diver, Jeff Talarigo’s debut novel about a Japanese woman living with leprosy, in Destroyer of myths.

On a lighter note, ITF Contributing Writer Russell Cobb finds that coping doesn’t always have to involve death or disease. In his essay Mad dog and glory, Cobb illuminates the sometimes funny cultural differences between playing American football while living in Paris versus playing American football as a kid in Oklahoma.

And, as always, our beloved cartoonists Tak Toyoshima and Mikhaela Reid bring us a good laugh with their comic strips.

Stay tuned for more: On Monday, September 20, we’ll publish provocative pieces penned by our columnists, Afi-Odelia E. Scruggs and Henry Belanger, as well as a photography essay on Brazilian cowboys by Alexandra Copley.

Thanks for reading. We hope you had a wonderful extended weekend!

Laura Elizabeth Pohl
Art Director
Columbia, Missouri

Laura Pohl

These days it’s almost impossible to avoid turning on the news or reading the paper without hearing stories about the politics of politics — that is, tales about the campaign trail, candidates’ families, scandals, and occasionally the candidates’ platforms.

Save for those moments when the candidates seek the support of voting blocs — the Jewish vote, the Latino vote, the female vote, the black vote — the predicaments of those on the margins of the United States and the world at-large receive scant attention. In this issue of InTheFray Magazine, we seek to broaden this year’s election dialogue by illuminating the interests and stories of the politically invisible.

Writing from the Democratic National Convention in Boston, ITF Contributing Writer Ayah-Victoria McKhail explores the media’s failure to cover the repression of free speech at the DNC in Tongue-tied. Harvard Ph.D. candidate Scott Winship, meanwhile, assesses the risks that the Democrats are taking by Compromising politics in order to send President George W. Bush back to Crawford, Texas. Complemeting Tak Toyoshima‘s Secret Asian Man cartoon about taking the Jap road,< b>Mikhaela B. Reid, our newest cartoonist, pokes fun at queers supporting President Bush in The boiling point. On Monday, August 16, ITF columnist and Managing Editor Henry Belanger will share his thoughts on the DNC.

Given the economic volatility that has predominated during the past four years, few can deny the decisive role that the economy will play on November 2. But as ITF Index Editor Laura Louison suggests in her review of David Shipler’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Working Poor (this month’s featured book from Off the Shelf), poverty isn’t merely an election year concern. For many, Louison discloses in Will work for food, impoverishment is a stark, everyday reality that demands national attention.

Of course, economic insecurity knows no borders — or age limits. As ITF Contributing Editor Michelle Chen reveals in Migrant makeover, teens from rural China who migrate to the city hoping to lift themselves from poverty by working in salons often pay a high price while supporting the country’s economic expansion. In nearby Vietnam, street youth participating in the Street Vision Project expose their economic struggles through their cameras in Street vision. Complementing these photos and highlighting the pervasiveness of the oppression experienced by children who lack economic standing, Josh Arseneau shares his poignant photos of child soldiers in West Africa, which we’ll publish on Monday, August 16.

Rounding out this week’s pieces are the visual works of art and the four poems performed by spoken word artists Joyce Lin (Understatement), Kate Hanzalik (Marilyn Chin tells my skin to run), Andre Michael Carrington (Boy rock), and Chavisa Woods (Totems) at InTheFray’s CROSSING BORDERS benefit in Manhattan last month. Special thanks to these fine poets and artists — and to all of our readers and friends who have continued to support our work here at ITF.

Laura Nathan
Editor
Austin, Texas

“

Laura Nathan-Garner

From Judy Garland we learned “there’s no place like home.” If only we, like her fictional character in The Wizard of Oz, could just click our heels a few times and find ourselves at home.

But beyond the silver screen, navigating our way home is rarely that simple. Thanks to globalization, refugee flows, the dissolution of nation-states and the advent of new ones, and drastic cultural changes in the definition of family, it is increasingly difficult to locate and define home. As we partner up with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop for this issue of InTheFray Magazine, we examine the complex meaning of “home” — for both those who have left one country to resettle in another and those who feel like outsiders in their country of origin.

We begin with three narratives about the immigrant experience, illuminating the multitude of ways in which assimilation — and the lack thereof — shapes notions of home and identity. In her photo essay, Open Wounds (which will be published on Monday, July 19), Lajla Hadzic documents the destruction of Sarajevo, Bosnia, nearly 10 years after civil war and genocide displaced 2.2 million people. Despite international reconstruction efforts, Hadzic reveals that bombed buildings, deforested parks, and ramshackle housing projects are the rule rather than the exception, leaving millions of Bosnians homeless — both literally and figuratively. San Diego Union-Tribune reporter and first-generation American Elena Gaona, meanwhile, shares her struggle to carve out a sense of belonging in the United States while her cultural traditions reside primarily in Mexico in This is my country. Rounding out this series of personal narratives, InTheFray contributing editor and Indian émigré Radhika Sharma describes the role that her senses of sound and taste play in shaping her post-emigration identity and how they help her gauge the extent of her Americanization in I liked tea.

Just north of the U.S. border in Canada, the struggle to retain a sense of self continues. As I suggest in Strangers in a strange land, my review of David Bezmozgis’ Natasha and Other Stories (this month’s selection from Off the Shelf), Soviet Jews, once persecuted for their religion, struggle to fit into the Canadian Jewish community as their more privileged brethren question — even belittle — their brand of Judaism. As Ayah-Victoria McKhail elucidates in Seduced by the Stars and Stripes?, cultural identity is also political. The narrow reelection of Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin’s Liberal Party last month may have jeopardized cross-border cooperation on President Bush’s National Missile Defense program — and Canada’s close alliance with its neighbor.

Back home in the United States, three authors meditate on our politics of exclusion. Richard Martin eloquently explores the double bind  experienced by queer men in prison in his poem GAY LIT. ITF columnist Afi Scruggs in “I don’t care that it is not signed by a senator,” argues that introductory footage from Michael Moore’s acclaimed film Fahrenheit 911 illuminates the importance of electing black officials and of holding democracy accountable to its less privileged constituents. Finally, on Monday, July 19, InTheFray columnist and Managing Editor Henry P. Belanger will serve us a little of his home-style political wisdom as he questions whether the “revelations” in Robert Greenwald’s guerilla documentary Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism are really all that groundbreaking in Confessions of a Fox News junkie.

Happy reading – and don’t forget to pick up your copy of The Working Poor, Off the Shelf’s featured book for August!

Laura Nathan
InTheFray Editor
Austin, Texas
“

Laura Nathan-Garner

Gazing out the window at the chirping birds and radiant sun, it’s difficult not to get a little giddy about the prospects of warm weather and seemingly exotic vacations. But while travel often sounds inviting — even relaxing — people around the world know that the checkout line images of shiny, happy people holding hands and frolicking across white sands rarely depict reality.

In this issue of InTheFray Magazine, we ask readers to look beyond the sleek advertisements and step outside their respective comfort zones, shed their sense of local belonging and explore the far reaches of the globe. Before we set off on our journey, credit cards and travelers’ checks in tow, Thomas J. Clancy urges readers to grab their wallets, reconsider whether “Visa [is really] everywhere you want to be,” and explore how we’ve exchanged our genuine economic security and belonging for a Society of cards.

Our not–so-foreign travels begin in Asia, where we invite readers to peer THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS, home to our new travel channel, and the terrain where Michelle Chen reconciles her Western desires for rugged simplicity with the unique brand of eclectic modernity practiced in China’s Yunnan Province in Eating bitter. And in Sierra Leone and Liberia, Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist John Kaplan explores the austere side of the looking glass, documenting Life after torture, through a series of photographs that may upset — even pain — viewers. But as Kaplan reminds us “speak [and look] we must.”

The next stop on our journey is France, where the national government recently banned the wearing of the Islamic veil in public institutions. Illuminating how the cultural definition of French citizenship is complicated by divides between secularism and faith, enlightenment values and multiculturalism, black and white, Russell Cobb looks Behind the veil to explore how French Muslims are negotiating the tension between their national identity and religious traditions.

Back on U.S. soil in East Los Angeles, Avelardo Ibarra blurs the lines between fiction and reality, “domestic” and “foreign,” in the story of El Jefe and the “day laborers, bums, drop outs, and the occasional nine-to-fiver” with whom he forges makeshift fraternities, bonding over shared socio-economic status, booze, women, and body fluids. Just on the other side of Los Angeles, ITF Literary Editor Justin Clark asks whether Violence is golden in Benjamin Weissman’s Headless, (this month’s featured book for ITF – Off the Shelf) or whether the masculine sadism saturating Weissman’s work is too much to handle in a world where violence seems to be the rule rather than the exception. Registered members of the site can also read ITF’s exclusive interview with Weissman. (If you’re not already a member, you can register now for free!)

Rounding out this month’s stories, as always, are the writings of our columnists. Daisy Hernandez, who helped launch the ITF columns, has moved on to work at Colorlines magazine, but we are excited to welcome Henry P. Belanger, a frequent ITF contributor and a regular PULSE columnist, onboard as our new Assistant Managing Editor and one of our featured columnists. Examining the controversy surrounding Bill Cosby’s ridicule of “lower-economic people” in the black community for their values, mannerisms, and dysfunction, Belanger’s inaugural column, Insert Jell-o reference here, discusses our collective impulse to be offended by “unpopular truths.”

This month Afi Scruggs is taking a short break while she travels to Senegal to gather material for her next column on being an African American in an African nation. But Scruggs isn’t the only one gravitating toward warmer climates. Be sure to check out the temperature of love in a time of conflict — that is, how you voted in our April reader survey!

Next month, ITF will continue its exploration of the relationship between the local and global as we co-sponsor an event with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop (AAWW), a grassroots nonprofit organization based in New York City’s Koreatown. On Thursday, July 15, the Workshop will host a multidisciplinary event centered on the theme of immigrant and refugee experience in the United States. The evening’s schedule will include poetry, theater, short films, and storytelling exploring ideas of “home” (adopted and imagined), identity, and work. As a co-sponsor, ITF invites writers and artists to contribute to both the workshop and a special issue of InTheFray. Finally, as part of this special event, we also encourage you to pick up a copy of David Bezmozgis’ Natasha and Other Stories, ITF – Off the Shelf’s featured book for July. To learn more about how you can participate in this special AAWW-ITF event, please email us.

Thanks for joining us on our journey!

Laura Nathan
Managing Editor
Austin, Texas“

Laura Nathan-Garner

Whose side are you on? East or West? North or South? Haiti or the Dominican Republic? Black or white? Rich or poor?  Pro-life or pro-choice? Are you with us or against us? Pro-Arab or pro-America? Are you in or out? The categories can seem arbitrary, even childish, but the world we live in isn’t a game of red rover: Distinctions like these often mean the difference between life and death, love and hate, peace and war.

Or, for that matter, segregation and integration. The word “segregation” is used far less frequently than it was 50 years ago, when the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that separate is not equal. But the fading away of that term doesn’t mean that the practice of segregation — intentional or not — has vanished. Today people throughout the world continue to grapple with differences and division — along the lines of class, ethnicity, national origin, gender, age, sexual orientation, religion, and a host of other categories.

As we commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, this special issue of InTheFray Magazine asks whether we should settle for a world of difference or continue struggling to step across the dividing lines. We begin with some historical context: Segregation’s last hurrah, a collection of Will Counts’ award-winning 1957 photographs of nine black students who defied the Arkansas National Guard to attend an all-white high school in Little Rock. In Making a nation of difference, we speak with Berkeley law professor Rachel F. Moran about how effective Brown has been in transforming racial attitudes in this country.

How do we balance our need to bond with people like ourselves, and our desire to bridge the divides separating us from others? Journalist and activist Robert Jensen examines the contradictions of being an antiracist advocate while also maintaining Illusions of superiority about his own whiteness. And guest columnist Carol Lee explores the struggles  faced by modern women who are confronted with both family and work responsibilities in We can do it … right?

Rounding out this week’s articles, we step onto a not-so-distant shore to examine the legacy of a centuries-old segregation linked tragically to North America’s own: the Caribbean island shared by two nations, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, separated near birth along lines of blood and bloodshed. In The handshake man, Justin Clark examines the struggles to fit in faced by Haitians on both sides of an island cleaved in two, while Sierra Prasada Millman, in Far from heaven, far from home, questions the possibilities of redemption for characters — and countries — trying to crawl out from the shadows of their violent histories in Haitian American writer Edwige Danticat’s novel The Dew Breaker.

On Monday, May 17, 2004 — the anniversary of the Brown decision — we will publish part two of this special issue, including:

April showers bring more than May flowers. They also bring gray days that make us want to curl up with a good book and mull over our relationships — though not necessarily at the same time.

In honor of this dreary season, InTheFray invites you to predict what the future holds for love in the midst of conflict. Please take a couple moments to complete Maureen Farrell’s relationship survey, which is sure to leave you laughing — and asking some questions of your own.

And don’t worry. We’ve got a place for you to take all of that inquisitive energy — Off the Shelf.

Off the bookshelf, that is. Beginning in May, our editors will share some of their favorite books with you. Think of it as a book club in cyberspace — with a dash of identity and community, of course!

As part of our special issue commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, the first book we’ll feature will be Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth. The critique of this novel will be published next month on Monday, May 17. Once you finish reading Juneteenth, the intriguing books will keep on coming. Each month an ITF editor will review a book concerning identity and/or community. The featured works will be a mix of old and new, fiction and nonfiction.

We’ll keep our Bookshelf at Powells.com updated so that you can purchase the books we’ll be reviewing in subsequent months a month or more in advance. And don’t worry, if you prefer to shop at Amazon, just click here. You’ll be taken right to the Amazon site, where you can purchase those books and start reading. (Of course, if you already have a dog-eared copy of the book sitting on your bookshelf somewhere, more power to you.)

While we’ll make the book reviews available to all ITF readers, only those who register on our site (membership is free!) will have access to all the special features of Off the Shelf. Members get access to exclusive interviews with the authors of selected books. They can take part in online discussions with other ITF readers and editors about the books. And they can submit their own reviews of the Book of the Month for publication on our site. (Did we mention that membership is free?!)

So don’t just sit there — get your copy of Juneteenth now!  You can even stock up and save on other books we’ll be reviewing later this summer. But beware: there aren’t CliffsNotes for most of the books we’re reviewing. So it’s probably a good idea for you to get your hands on — and read — our featured books ahead of time.

Happy reading!

Laura Nathan
Managing Editor
Austin, Texas

Laura Nathan-Garner

Love and conflict go together. Passion creates arguments. Enchanted April is rainy, at least in my neighborhood.

Of course it doesn’t have to be that way. In this month’s issue on the conflicts that arise from coupling, you’ll also find a country girl and city boy who surprisingly meld in reader Annie Murphy’s personal story Where metro and manure become one, a 70-year-old pair of lovebirds in Kathrin Spirk’s photo essay, and arranged matches that have survived the transfer to America in Radhika Sharma’s piece Outsourcing marriage.

But as leftist reader Tania Boghossian found out, coupling also leads to complications, both personal and political. Her essay Left/right love details a disastrous affair with a staunch Republican. Later this month, on April 19th, Henry Belanger explores the unhealthy tendencies of the President’s “Healthy Marriage” initiative, while Adam Lovingood shares photos of ecstatic but controversial gay newlyweds in San Francisco.  

Our columnists share their own unique take on the current political battleground. Benoit Denizet-Lewis marks his ITF debut by unearthing the tape of a late-night conversation between John Kerry and Al Gore while Afi Scruggs heralds a new civil rights movement and reexamines the old one. Cartoonist Tak Toyoshima begs the question, “Why can’t all of us American immigrants just love each other?”

Alas, love and harmony are not the bedfellows we’d like them to be. At least not in this day and age, when the nuance and complexity of relationships has been exchanged for self-help guides that help men get girls quickly. While editor Laura Nathan’s attempts to sabotage one such guide went unappreciated by the author, ITFers can enjoy the irony.

So enjoy our Enchanted/Haunted April of Love. And don’t forget to take our Readers’ Survey to let us know your views on relationships: straight, conflicted, or otherwise.

Nicole Leistikow
Managing Editor
Baltimore

Coming in May: Our special issue commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision

Nicole Leistikow

Opinion writing: We all do it. Because whether or not we commit it to paper, we all harbor, formulate, and rework opinions on just about every matter, from the morning commute to the Democratic primaries to the war in Iraq. The opinion piece is our most democratic form of writing. Not only is it accessible and provocative and engaging, but it can also give us a new in to an old story or a much-needed pause on a steady stream of digital information. And in a time of increasing polarization and global activism, political and social commentary gives context to experiences that otherwise would just get buried in paragraph twenty-three of a news story.

On that note, we’d like to introduce you to a new channel of editorial writing and cartoons at InTheFray. We hope you’ll find commentary here that makes you want to IM your friends, chuckle, or take action in your own community.

In her first column, veteran journalist Afi-Odelia E. Scruggs tackles how the flux of immigrants to the United States has complicated, interrogated, and perhaps even changed the identity of fellow African Americans. With an astute eye for details, Scruggs takes us food shopping (really) and into another way of seeing racial and ethnic definitions.

Scruggs, who now makes her home in Cleveland, Ohio, has previously penned her observations while working as a metro columnist in Dayton, Ohio. She’s reported for newspapers in Mississippi, published three books, and teaches in addition to writing.  In future columns, you’ll see Scruggs offer up commentary on the way we wrestle with the past and our tangled heritages, and how we form what often turns out to be an ever-changing identity.

We’re also delighted to offer you the comic strip, “Secret Asian Man” (SAM). The creation of Tak Toyoshima, it has become the first widely printed comic strip with a leading Asian American character. It’s downright funny, endearing, and irreverent in taking jabs at stereotypes that are created and perpetuated from inside and outside the Asian American community. Once a metal head and now a dad, SAM in this issue fields questions about his run for the presidency. If you want a man who can take out Bush, SAM is the one.

In upcoming issues, we will also bring you a column by Benoit Denizet-Lewis, a 2004 Alicia Patterson Fellow and award-winning reporter and magazine writer who focuses on youth culture, gay culture, politics, and sports. He’s authored cover stories for The New York Times Magazine and written for Spin, Out, and the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine. Stay tuned for his commentaries.

We hope you’ll read, comment, and consider submitting your own opinions (and photos!) as follows:

For the April issue, two ITF channels — Interact and Image — are looking for Commentary Features and Photo Features that have to do with the subject of love crossing boundaries. We’re looking for your own thoughtful and humorous first-person stories exploring what happens when two people from different categories start looking at each other “in that way.” Be they Catholic/Jew, vegetarian/carnivore, Republican/Democrat, buff/unbuff, we want to know how possible or impossible it is to be with someone from the other side, what issues come up, what conflicts arise, what accommodations are made, how friends and family feel about it, and how it improves or makes life a little tougher (though it’s worth it, of course). Pitches for April should be sent by February 21, to love@inthefray.com. Did we that mention prizes, in the form of a $50 gift certificate to an establishment of your choice, will be given for the top three stories?

For the May issue, Interact is looking for undergraduate students at colleges and universities to weigh in on segregation in American higher education and throughout contemporary youth culture. Many school districts in the South and the North are more segregated than they were two or three decades ago as white flight and separation are still quite real. Similarly, many colleges and universities continue to have segregated dorms, segregated student clubs, segregated fraternities and sororities, segregated lunch spots, segregated graduation ceremonies, and segregated academic departments. In light of the segregation persisting in educational settings, there is more of a consciousness of a multiracial America. People — Tiger Woods among them — are celebrating their mixed racial heritages. Hip-Hop is bringing a new cultural identity to teens and young adults that seems to trump race. So is it still as necessary to celebrate your own ethnic or racial identity as it was in the aftermath of the 50s and 60s? Is identity less important in the new consciousness of a multiracial America? Or is the talk of multiracial consciousness nothing more than talk — just a passing fad and the hope of idealistic young people? Using these questions as a starting point, contributors should submit short well-argued statements regarding how integrated we are as a society fifty years after the Brown decision. Pitches for May should be sent by March 10,
to: divide@inthefray.com.

So, please remember to get vocal, get passionate, take sides, and let us know what you think.

Daisy Hernández
Assistant Managing Editor
San Francisco

Daisy Hernandez