What Would Thomas Friedman Write?

The columnist receives the satire treatment; a gay GOP group places an anti-Chuck Hagel ad in The New York Times to get President Obama’s attention; meanwhile, the Chinese government is mandating people visit their elderly parents. These discoveries and more below.

On a regular basis, Truthdig brings you the news items and odds and ends that have found their way to Larry Gross, director of the USC Annenberg School for Communication. A specialist in media and culture, art and communication, visual communication and media portrayals of minorities, Gross helped found the field of gay and lesbian studies.

Backlash to the Backlash Imagine if academics sat down with ordinary people like you and me and ironed out some real solutions to our capital gains crisis.

Why Do We Blink So Frequently? We all blink. A lot. The average person blinks some 15-20 times per minute—so frequently that our eyes are closed for roughly 10% of our waking hours overall.

The Sneaky Plan to Cut Social Security and Raise Taxes by Changing How Inflation is Calculated As fiscal-cliff negotiations continue, reports indicate that the two sides are still at an impasse because the GOP insists that “chained CPI” be included in any deal. What is chained CPI?

Who Paid for the Log Cabin Republicans’ Anti-Hagel NYT Ad? Last Thursday, the gay GOP group Log Cabin Republicans (LCR) placed a full-page ad in the New York Times that attacked Chuck Hagel as anti-Israel and anti-gay and urged President Obama not to appoint him as Defense Secretary

Agenda Prevails Over Truth In the Western world truth no longer has any meaning.

Why It Stopped Making Sense to Talk About ‘The Internet’ in 2012 Many people use, as a kind of shorthand, The Internet to mean a wide variety of things related to this series of tubes.

Could a Black Director Have Made ‘Django’? Tarantino’s daring film would have been received differently by the media — or never made — if he wasn’t white.

The Left is Moving Right. What to do? The left has been moving further and further right and it has to stop.

China Requiring People to Visit Their Aged Parents Visit your parents. That’s an order.

Los Angeles Wants to ‘Reconstitute’ Pioneering High School Despite Major Gains How should management respond when a group of union teachers pilots a nationally recognized reform model at a historically troubled school, working side by side with parents, students, community organizations, and academics, and makes big gains in the first year?