From Sign & Sight, Jurgen Habermas on why both religious and secular mentalities must be open to a complementary learning process if we are to balance shared citizenship and cultural difference. From Kritika & Kontext, a look at how Nietzsche's deconstruction of authoritarian subjectivity shares much with Jacques Derrida's post-modern critique of the subject as a privileged centre of discourse. A review of Philosophical Knowledge: Its Possibility and Scope. From The Root, what black people call white people, and it ain't "whitey". Can Lil Wayne save hip-hop? He insists he's "the best rapper alive", but can his smash-hit new album really redeem a flagging genre? A review of All About the Beat: Why Hip-Hop Can't Save Black America by John McWhorter. An interview with John Hope Franklin on an Obama presidency. The Hugh Hefner of Politics: From porno to the primaries, the long, strange life of pro-Hillary blogger Taylor Marsh. An interview with Jhumpa Lahiri: "Writing makes me so vulnerable" (and more from Bookforum). Loving chick-lit: People sneer at these books, but wittily told romantic fiction is as hard to write as it is fun to read. How to pick up girls with the new Roth: Carrying Bolano’s 2666 is like driving an open-top Porsche (and an excerpt from Nazi Literature in the Americas). Nice guys knew it, now studies have confirmed it: bad boys get the most girls.
