Enslave your girls and women, harbor anti-U.S. terrorists, destroy every vestige of civilization in your homeland, and the Bush administration will embrace you. All that matters is that you line up as an ally in the drug war, the only international cause that this nation still takes seriously.

That's the message sent with the recent gift of $43 million to the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan, the most virulent anti-American violators of human rights in the world today. The gift, announced last Thursday by Secretary of State Colin Powell, in addition to other recent aid, makes the U.S. the main sponsor of the Taliban and rewards that "rogue regime" for declaring that opium growing is against the will of God. So, too, by the Taliban's estimation, are most human activities, but it's the ban on drugs that catches this administration's attention.

EVERY period of history has its secrets and the last 100 years are no exception. Index on Censorship, which actively promotes freedom of expression, is marking the end of the 20th century with a photographic documentary describing an alternative reality. In collaboration with the Hulton Getty Picture Collection, Index's book Underexposed presents pictures that have been suppressed, manipulated or banned altogether. We also see images - often disturbing - which document events that most would rather forget.

I would say Anarchism is the attempt to eradicate all forms of domination. This includes not only such obvious forms as the nation-state, with its routine use of violence and the force of law, and the corporation, with its institutionalized irresponsibility, but also such internalized forms as patriarchy, racism, homophobia. Also it is the attempt to expose the ways our philosophy, religion, economics, and other ideological constructions perform their primary function, which is to rationalize or naturalize--make seem natural--the domination that pervades our way of life: the destruction of the natural world or of indigenous peoples, for example, comes not as the result of decisions actively made and actions pursued, but instead, so we convince ourselves, as a manifestation of Darwinian selection, or God's Will, or economic exigency. Beyond that, Anarchism is the attempt to look even into those parts of our everyday lives we accept as givens, as parts of the universe, to see how they, too, dominate us or facilitate our domination of others. What is the role of division of labor in the alienation and destruction we see around us? Even more fundamentally, what is the relationship between domination and time, numbers, language, or even symbolic thought itself?

Last week a student who had studied metaphysics and epistemology and Soren Kierkegaard, the student who read Immanuel Kant and brought fresh fruit to class, killed herself with a single gunshot to the head, sitting at home, at the kitchen table. She left no note, no explanation, and no one can make any sense of it. Her professors lean heavily against the classroom walls and cannot speak. We realize too late that we never taught our students what ducks know without knowing, that "we must love life before loving its meaning," as Dostoevski told us. We must love life, and some meaning may grow from that love. But "if love of life disappears, no meaning can console us."

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One of my colleagues says that, if there is eternal life, it isn't found in the length of one's life, but in its depth. That makes sense to me. I have no doubt that each life has a definite limit, an endpoint, but I don't think there is any limit to the potential depth of each moment, and I try to live in a way that reaches into those depths. I want to live thickly, in layers of ideas and emotions and sensory experience. I recommend a way of life that is rich with noticing, caring, remembering, embracing, and rejoicing - in the smell of a child's hair or the color of storm light.

Under capitalism, the creativity of most people had become diverted and stifled, and society had been divided into actors and spectators, producers and consumers. The Situationists therefore wanted a different kind of revolution: they wanted the imagination, not a group of men, to seize power, and poetry and art to be made by all. Enough! they declared. To hell with work, to hell with boredom! Create and construct an eternal festival.

Why Move?
Just as highly repetitive motion is a risk factor for musculoskeletal discomfort, pain, and even worse, so is no motion at all. When we are stuck in one position for prolonged periods, oxygen and nutrients are not flowing to our muscles or other soft tissues. Get up and move! Change postures! Take those minibreaks!

A German scientist is prescribing aimless sloth as the antidote to professional stress and the secret to a long life.

"People who would rather laze in a hammock instead of running a marathon or who take a midday nap instead of playing squash have a better chance of living into old age," Professor Peter Axt, co- author of the newly published study "On the Joy of Laziness", said on Wednesday.

... Committing heresy in a country where many consider waking after sun-up a sin, he also slammed early rising -- getting up too soon leaves people stressed for the whole the day, he said.

When I read something truthful, something real, I breathe a deep sigh and say, "Fantastic - I wasn't mad or alone in thinking that, after all!" So often we are left to our own devices, struggling in the dark with this external and internal propaganda system. At that point, for someone to tell us the truth is a gift. In a world where people all around us are lying and confusing us, to be honest is a great kindness.

The story Fox tried to kill involved rBGH milk, which is produced using Monsanto's recombinant bovine growth hormone. We documented how the hormone, which can harm cows, was approved by the government as a veterinary drug without adequate testing of how it affected the children and adults who drink rBGH milk.

The investigation began with random visits to seven farms to determine whether and how widely rBGH was being used in Florida. I confirmed its use at every one of the seven farms I visited...

...health concerns raised by scientists around the world have never been settled, and indeed, the product has been outlawed or shunned in every other major industrialized country on the planet.

• Emergence of Advertising in America, 1850-1920 - A database of over 9,000 advertising items and publications dating from 1850 to 1920, illustrating the rise of consumer culture, especially after the American Civil War, and the birth of a professionalized advertising industry in the United States.
• Documents from the Women's Liberation Movement - An on-line collection featuring transcribed texts and scanned images of over 40 articles, pamphlets, flyers, and booklets published from 1969 to 1974 which reflect the diversity of theory and activities characterizing the early years of the U.S. Women's Liberation Movement.
• The Urban Landscape: Digital Image Access Project - A searchable database of 1000 images from various collections pertaining to the theme "The Urban Landscape".
• Civil War Women - On-line archival collections featuring scanned pages and texts of the writings of women during the American Civil War.
• Duke Papyrus Archive - The Duke Papyrus Archive provides electronic access to texts about and images of 1,373 papyri from ancient Egypt.
• Third Person, First Person: Slave Voices from the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library - This exhibit probes the life experiences of American slaves from the late eighteenth century through the nineteenth century, and examines the enterprise of recovering and preserving African American history of the period.

...It really would change many people's view of daily life, and perhaps also their sense of politics, if they spent the few hours it takes to read this brisk book.

...To set this up just a bit more for onlookers, before asking a question, let me explain that your book is the account of three month-long episodes of attempting to live entirely on earnings from $7- or $8-per-hour jobs. You show up in low-wage cities and try to get on your feet, like someone "graduating" from welfare to work. One of many intriguing aspects is the juggling of three challenges: landing a job (not that hard, in the "tight" economy of the late nineties); doing the job (sometimes quite hard, as you make vivid); and finding a place to live (nearly impossible, for reasons we will get to).

Before the advent of online news and entertainment, advertising and its cousin, public relations, were like pornography: You generally knew it when you saw it. But with the ever-increasing torrent of Internet "content" splashed across the Web, much of it not only corporate-sponsored but corporate-created, sussing the actual message from this medium gets pretty tricky.

This trend toward dressing (some would say disguising) advertising and public relations as news is driven by economics. A standard press release costs only a few hundred dollars to compose and distribute electronically, making the Net a low-cost distribution channel.