How the 1 Percent Does Disney World

Some wealthy families are renting handicapped scooters to skip lines at the famous theme park; the newest way to stalk someone is apparently to use a drone; meanwhile, the SATs were canceled in all of South Korea due to allegations of widespread cheating. 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.

Well, This Is Just Awful: ‘Renting’ Disabled People to Skip Lines at Disney World The lines at Disney World are awful, we can all agree, but the lengths to which some people will go to bypass them are worse.

Why Can’t We Take Pictures in Art Museums? It’s a scene that plays itself out hundreds of times a day in American museums: a mother and her fidgety teenage daughter stand before a famous painting—in this case, Caravaggio’s The Toothpuller, from the early 17th century.

The E-Book Piracy Debate, Revisited One year ago, Tor Books UK, a publisher of science fiction and fantasy, tried a remarkable experiment: it dropped copy protection from its e-books.

China Destroys the Ancient Buddhist Symbols of Lhasa City in Tibet Ignoring both religious freedom and the outcry of the Tibetan people, the Chinese authorities have begun demolishing the ancient capital of Lhasa, including one of the most important Buddhist sites of the city, Tibet’s holiest Jokhang Temple.

Manifesto: The Art and Science of Education We are on the cusp of a golden age of education–if we can only reach for it.

Man Refuses to Stop Drone-Spying on Seattle Woman Walk onto someone’s lawn and you’re trespassing; fly over it in a helicopter and you’re in the clear — “the air is a public highway,” the Supreme Court declared in 1946.

Ronald Reagan: Accessory to Genocide The conviction of former Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt on charges of genocide against Mayan villagers in the 1980s has a special meaning for Americans who idolize Ronald Reagan.

Connecting the Dots—or Not Paul Krugman continues to have a hard time connecting the dots—for example, between inequality and macroeconomics.

Why Everything You Know About Wolf Packs is Wrong The alpha wolf is a figure that looms large in our imagination.

For the First Time, SAT Test Gets Canceled in an Entire Country Some 1,500 South Korean students who dream of attending elite American colleges are scrambling after the U.S.-based administrator of the SAT cancelled the scheduled May 4 session of the exam due to allegations of widespread cheating.

Targeting Stephen Hawking and Dustin Hoffman: Right-wing ‘Pro-Israel’ Advocacy as Hate Speech Professor Steven Plaut teaches business finance and economics at the University of Haifa.

South Africa’s Sub-Imperial Seductions Thanks are due to an odd man, the brutally-frank Zambian vice president Guy Scott who last week pronounced, “I dislike South Africa for the same reason that Latin Americans dislike the United States”, and to president Jacob Zuma for forcing a long-overdue debate, just as the World Economic Forum Africa summit opens in Cape Town: is Pretoria a destructive sub-imperialist power?

Class Struggles It should come as no surprise that, as reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education, students on college campuses are struggling over the issue of class.