Peter Laufer

n 1971, Philip Zimbardo, then a professor of psychology at Stanford University, devised one of the most famous psychological experiments of the twentieth century. In what is known as the Stanford Prison Experiment, he assigned twenty-four young men roles as prisoners and guards, and observed the group dynamics that ensued. To his horror, the study […]

AM: We hope the Scoop 08 is going to be the first real national daily student newspaper in history. The timing is totally right, the technology is there, and with the election, the interest is there. For the first time students all across the country are really excited about this. AM: We have an editorial […]

Immediately after 9/11, the New Yorker writer Lawrence Wright e-mailed his editor, David Remnick, and said, Put me to work. He wasnt kidding. Wright spent the next five years traveling to remote corners of the world in an ambitious attempt to explain the intellectual and political origins of al-Qaeda. He interviewed more than 600 people, […]

For most of us, the strange saga of Bill OReillys sexual harassment of a female colleague dragged public discourse to a new low in the fall of 2004. Nobody ever really wanted to hear OReillys unorthodox suggestions for the amorous use of a loofahor, as he termed it, a falafel. But for the Seattle composer […]

When they were not following the harvest, immigrants from south of the border once clustered in a few big cities: Los Angeles, Phoenix, Dallas, Houston, Chicago, Denver. By the 1990s, that roster had expanded: meat-packing plants in rural parts of the country, unable to seduce native labor, starting hiring workers off the streets of Veracruz […]