Philip Roth has always surrounded his protagonists with exaggerated levels of arousal—Alex Portnoy’s exploration with liver, Mickey Sabbath’s underwear theft, David Kepesh’s Kafka-esque transformation into a breast. Roth’s 30th novel, The Humbling, is short enough to be considered a novella, but the themes remain the same.

In The Humbling, Simon Axler, 64, is a world-renowned actor who suffers a colossal breakdown, only to be brought back to life by an affair with a woman 25 years his junior. To complicate matters, Pegeen, the target of his desire, is a lesbian whose parents are close friends of Simon. All of Simon’s time is now spent doting on Pegeen, transforming her from a butch lesbian into a heterosexual female retooled with a two-hundred dollar haircut and Manhattan wardrobe.

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From micro-cleaning electric toothbrushes, to staplers with an extra large grip, to scissors that convert to letter openers, Jonathan Cedar is no stranger to invention. You could even say he has a passion for efficiency. Now, along with his business partner, Cedar has developed a stove that might just be able to solve the carbon crisis in developing nations.

Their BioLite stove not only uses dramatically less wood than regular stoves, but it also reduces the output of black carbon into the air by 90 percent. How’s that for efficiency?

After the jump, read an exclusive TakePart interview with Cedar and learn about ridding the world of batteries, the perils of toxic smoke, and perfecting a product to the point where it can be referred to as ultra clean. Read the rest of this entry >>

We all know someone who’s tried to push a copy of The Secret on us, insisting that one reading will change our life and that positive thinking is the solution when times are tough. But Barbara Ehrenreich, best-selling author of Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch, dispels much of the pseudo-science  behind the powers of positive thinking in her latest book, Bright-Sided.

Although she would genuinely like to see more smiles and hugs in the world, Ehrenreich refers to the ongoing movement of positive thinking as a mass delusion, as applied to her own encounter with “Pink Ribbon Culture” during her bout with breast cancer. Her frustrations lie with those who insist that the only way to achieve success and money is through positive thinking. It’s not fair, she notes, that the sick, poor, or unemployed are thought to be in those circumstances because they emit negative thoughts.

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There is an old short story about a man who, unable to forget anything, is condemned to exist in a “world of nothing but particulars.” In his new book, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger argues that our digital footprints have led to a similar relationship with memory.

Delete provides an intriguing theory about the role of memory in society, the ways in which our desire to record and display everything on the Internet has eliminated our ability to take risks—romantically, professionally, financially—and a potential future that is “unforgiving because it is unforgetting.”

Mayer-Schönberger points to ways that the Internet can be used against you: a teacher loses her job because of a drunken Myspace photo, a 60-year-old is held at the Canadian-U.S. border for publishing a paper on the Internet that details the experience of dropping acid 30 years ago. Granted, those people voluntarily disclosed information about themselves, and the writer determines that we often disclose personal details without knowing.

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From an early age, we are taught to believe that the United States is a melting pot of immigrants, a  concept that is now entrenched in a frenzy of laws and debate. Such is the message behind Justin Akers Chacón and Mike Davis’s collaboration, No One Is Illegal, an examination of the history and treatment of immigrants in the U.S. with a particular focus on the U.S.-Mexico border.

To fully understand the significance of the American immigration movement, it’s important to have an awareness of the politics of exclusion. And to gain insight on this topic, we hear from Mike Davis. Davis is the brilliant–yes, brilliant–historian behind such works as City of Quartz and Planet of Slums.

Here he presents a succinct and engaging background of the vigilantes in California, dating back to the 1850s and backed by an extreme white prejudice analogous to the racial hatred in the South. The movement was led by a highly organized and influential group of white men who strived to “restore law and order to a society overrun by criminal immigrants.”

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Twenty years ago, bottled water did not exist. Today, half your office probably refuses to drink from the tap. Elizabeth Royte, author of Bottlemania, is haunted by the thirty to forty billion plastic water bottles discarded each year, and intently shows the impact the bottled water industry has on humans and the environment.

So staunch is Royte’s dedication to hydration and tap water that she devises controlled experiments involving food dye to monitor her daughter’s drinking habits throughout the school day. She also travels throughout the country, narrating the dubious practices of Nestle, Pepsi, and other major corporations behind the bottled water industry.

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Over the past 25 years, graduating from a public university in just four years became tantamount to leaving the party before it even started. This is a notion raised by Dr. Michael S. McPherson, one of the authors of Crossing the Finish Line, released this month from Princeton University Press. Recently, Dr. McPherson spoke with TakePart about the diminishing graduation rates at public universities and the disastrous effect this trend could have on the economy.

Consider this fact: fewer than 30 percent of 8th graders will earn a BA by the age of 26. And less than 60 percent of the students entering four-year colleges in America today are graduating. Crossing the Finish Line offers a staggering amount of data that focuses on patterns of education at public universities, relating differences in academic preparedness and family circumstances among students. This information is presented in a concise fashion, with additional appendixes of data available online.

After the jump, Dr. Michael S. McPherson, president of the Spencer Foundation and the former president of Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, talks about what TakePart readers can do to improve graduation rates.

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Most people can recall the scenario: A Friday night rolls around and the house keys are handed to a girl, with more pigtails than attention span, who lets you run around wild for three hours while she stays glued to the phone. Or, on the flip side, many recall the dread of being left alone with the neighbors’ demon-spawn for $4 an hour. It’s a central part of the American youth experience: Babysitting.

In her new book, Babysitter: An American History, Miriam Forman-Brunell, a former babysitter-turned-academic, provides an economic and cultural history of babysitting, making a study of the changing perceptions of the vocation, and throwing light on the interconnections of girls as workers, consumers, and producers of their own subculture.

Forman-Brunell outlines the history of babysitting starting with the turn to childcare during the Great Depression, and picking up speed with the 1950s postwar suburban baby boom, when irritable parents imagined bobby-soxer babysitters “sitting on the sofa and ticking like a taxi meter.” Read the rest of this entry >>

I read Marnia Lazreg’s Questioning the Veil on a cross-country flight, sitting next to a teenage girl who was wearing hot pink shorts and a black tank top. The girl spent the trip listening to music, applying makeup, and examining her bellybutton ring. She could not have been more of a contrast to the young women I was learning about in Lazreg’s open letters to Muslim women.

Lazreg, who was raised in a Muslim family in Algeria, compiles 15 years worth of interviews with women all over the world and presents a series of reflections on women who are reclaiming the major styles of veiling (hijab, jilbab, niqab, and khimar) as a means of liberation.

Lazreg’s letters examine how wearing the veil is more often paradoxical than religious, and the writer takes bold steps in asking controversial questions, followed by concrete answers. She gives a number of reasons why a woman should not wear a veil, showing that modesty is neither protected nor enhanced by the veil. She points out that nowhere in the Quran is there any indication that the veil is a condition of a woman’s faith. Read the rest of this entry >>