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Archive, Books

The Rise and Fall of an American Gang: Religion as Camouflage?

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A history of what began as a clique of kids on the street, developed into a disciplined organization that reordered the nature of gang relations in Chicago (inaugurating the alliances of various gangs under the umbrella “People” and “Folk” labels), and was reinvented by its “Chief” as first a Moorish Science and then an Islamic religious organization; all the while running a variety of criminal enterprises, culminating in negotiations with the Libyan government with the hopes of being paid in exchange for unleashing certain amount of targeted violence in Chicago. There’s a series of huge stories here, and this book—while certainly the best resource on the subject—is hurt by the sheer range of material it has to address.

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Culture

You Are Not Your Star Sign

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A few weeks ago the stars were realigned. The Archimedes’ Lever of this cosmic shift was, of all places, in Minnesota, where a newspaper published an article quoting an astronomer on an issue involving the accumulated result of long, slow gravitational pull. These comments went viral online at something close to the speed of light, leading to reevaluation of the Zodiac, panic among horoscope followers, assorted tweets defending or regretting tattoo selections, and some attempts at explanation from astrologists as to their systems of making sense of human existence through claims about the pull of the stars. 

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(A)theologies

Crying Witch: Learning From the O’Donnell “Dabbling” Debacle

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While Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell didn’t say anything about Wicca, per se, when she talked about “dabbling into witchcraft,” her more recent “kill the witch” comments will surely distance her further from pagan communities used to dealing (especially around Halloween) with this confusion between the swirling cultural tropes of “the witch” and those who embrace “witch” as a religious self-description.

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