July 2011 has been a meteoric month for Adele (21) and Eminem (Recovery). Their digital album sales, exceeding 1.017 million and 1.005 million respectively, have made music history. The artists seem to be a pair of space bound rocket ships aiming for the moon. But soaring success in cyberspace is not all they share. A closer look reveals they might be singing different versions of the same song.

On a clear night in June I watched a man kill himself. He said he was going to do it. I don't know why. And I'm not the only one.

Let’s be honest. Teachers don’t get into the profession for the money. Nowadays they don’t get into the profession for respect either. So why do they do it? Or, as it was put to Elizabeth Halsey (Cameron Diaz) in “Bad Teacher”: “What has to go so horribly wrong in life that you end up educating middle school children?”

If you’re reading this, then you’ve probably been invited to commemorate or at least think about Loving Day this year. And with good reason. In 1958, newlyweds Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving were indicted on charges of violating Virginia’s ban on interracial marriages and were banished from their home state. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the law in 1967.

Here we go again. From popular culture to global politics to religion, the rise of mad masculinity is reaching new heights. A few months back we were entertained by Charlie Sheen’s and Chris Brown’s bad behavior. Now, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Catholic Church and Libyan troops are under fire for misogyny and/or sexual abuse. Recent events have led Time Magazine and others to ask an important, if ineloquent, question: Why are some men such pigs?

About a week ago Fox News started a “Common Controversy” about whether the Chicago-based poet and rapper should have been invited to a White House poetry reading by the First Lady.

Dispelling Donald Trump’s birther charges that Barack Obama is foreign-born, the president released his long-form birth certificate Wednesday. Politifact, the fact-checking site for politics, says its article about the issue (with a link to the certification of live birth) is the most popular item that it has ever published. The certificate and its release prove two things most people should already know: Obama is an American. And, as PBS host Tavis Smiley put it to MSNBC, the 2012 presidential race is shaping up to be “the ugliest, the nastiest, the most divisive, and the most racist in the history of this Republic.”