Americans tend to sort themselves geographically by party or ideology so that like-minded people tend to live near one another.
Liberals are about as exclusive in their friendships as conservatives: 34 percent of them say four or five of their five closest friends have college degrees. Among conservatives it is 30 percent.

From elementary through high school, New York City children tend to go to school with others similar to themselves, in one of the country’s most racially segregated systems.

The latest New York Times/CBS News poll took a reading on the attitudes of American women on a range of topics, from politics to opportunities in the workplace to their overall level of satisfaction in life. We called back a number of them to talk further and also consulted some experts about the challenges facing women today. Here are some of their voices.

Japan's demographic challenges are well-known: It's home to the world's oldest population and has a shrinking birthrate and an astonishing number of single people. And it seems that, despitegovernment efforts to incentivize marriage and child-rearing, things aren't quite trending in the right direction.

They spent entire careers trying to spot mounds or depressions in the earth that would allow them to map even small parts of Angkor, the urban center at the heart of the Khmer empire, which covered a vast region of what is now Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam and Laos from roughly A.D. 802 to 1431.

The screen revolution has seen pedagogy undergo a seismic shift as technology now dominates the educational landscape. In almost every classroom in America today, you will find some type of screen—smartboards, Chromebooks, tablets, smartphones. From inner-city schools to those in rural and remote towns, we have accepted tech in the classroom as a necessary and beneficial evolution in education.

The sugar industry paid scientists in the 1960s to play down the link between sugar and heart disease and promote saturated fat as the culprit instead, newly released historical documents show.

One in five seafood samples tested worldwide turns out to be completely different from what the menu or packaging says, according to a report on seafood fraud released Wednesday by the ocean conservation group Oceana. Of the more than 25,000 seafood samples the group analyzed, 20 percent were incorrectly labeled.

Even with Facebook, Netflix and other digital distractions increasingly vying for time, Americans’ appetite for reading books — the ones you actually hold in your hands — has not slowed in recent years, according to a study by the Pew Research Center.

A book I wrote in 2006 became difficult to obtain: Võ Phiến and the Sadness of Exile.
It describes the life and work of Võ Phiến, a well-known writer in Vietnam and also in the exile community. He died in Santa Ana, CA, last September at the age of 90.
But now my book is available again, thanks to Humboldt State University Press which has just issued a second edition and can now be downloaded for free from the web (the whole book or a chapter or a page) or one can purchase a hard copy from Amazon for $14.
Access to online version on Digital Commons Access
to print version on Amazon
Contact: Kyle Morgan, Kyle.Morgan@humboldt.edu
In the first book-length study in English of a modern Vietnamese writer, emeritus English professor John Schafer provides a vital perspective on European colonialism and the revolution to overthrow it, the spread of communism and the attempts to suppress it, and the flight of people across the earth to escape war and political upheaval.
Schafer tells Võ Phiến’s own moving life story—his brief time as a member of the liberation army, his disillusion with communism, his family’s struggle to adapt to a new life in the U.S. Included also are close readings of Võ Phiến’s stories and essays about how war affects humble villagers.
“When water buffaloes fight, flies and mosquitoes get killed.” This proverb speaks to the dangers of living where political and military battles of the major powers take place. We hear the buffaloes’ perspective, but rarely that of someone like Võ Phiến who grew up in Bình Định, a province that was a battleground for a quarter of a century. “Võ Phiến’s achievement,” Schafer says, “was that he took country characters, ordinary people who were not heroic or physically attractive, and made readers see beauty in them.”