This summer, the United States is reaching new heights of dance fever as TV shows like Fox's "So You Think You Can Dance" and MTV's "Randy Jackson Presents: America's Top Dance Crew" have returned to the airwaves. MTV's runaway hit is considered especially cutting edge, showcasing hip-hop dance groups from across America. But if MTV really wants the best dance crew, it should be looking in South Korea.

"Of the top six or seven crews in the world, I'd say half of them are from Korea," says Christopher "Cros One" Wright, 33, an American dance promoter and b-boy who was recently in Suwon, South Korea, to judge the second annual global invitational hip-hop dance competition, called R16, that was held at the end of May.

The development of South Koreans' hip-hop dancing could be seen a cultural parallel to their sharp global ascendance in electronics and automaking. A decade ago, Koreans were struggling to imitate the Bronx-style b-boy and West Coast funk styles that are the backbone of the genre. Now, a handful of these crews are the safest bets to win any competition anywhere.

Certainly no country takes its hip-hop dance more seriously. The Korean government -- through its tourism board and the city of Suwon -- invested nearly $2 million in this year's competition. Two of the most successful teams, Gamblers and Rivers, have been designated official ambassadors of Korean culture. Once considered outcasts, the b-boys now seem to embody precisely the kind of dynamic, dexterous and youthful excellence that the government wants to project.

Although hip-hop dance goes back at least 35 years, the top Korean b-boys trace their histories back just 11 years, to 1997, the Year Zero of Korean breaking. By 2001, the first year that a Korean crew entered the Battle of the Year -- the world's biggest b-boy contest -- they won "best show" honors and a fourth-place trophy. Every year since, a Korean crew has placed first or second. Says Battle of the Year founder Thomas Hergenrother, "Korea is on a different planet at the moment."

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The full thang is here. If ya dig, then Digg. If ya buzz, then Buzz.

PHILLIPS :: ...the public showed that it can produce a significant swing in 2006, in electoral terms. But the issues on which they suppopsedly voted are not being addressed. How do you vote to get everybody out of Iraq for example? Vote for the Democrats? That hasn't worked so far.

MCCONNELL :: And it cuts both ways. The people who have been voting Republican for the past thirty years on cultural rather than class issues--i.e. culturally conservative Reagan Democrats--have gotten nothing for their votes either. But there is no evidence whatsoever that they are going to stop voting Republican.

KEVIN BAKER, Harper's Magazine contributing editor :: It's like you have this weird inversion of Tammany. They don't get you out of jail, they don't give you a turkey at Christmas, they don't do anything for you, and yet somehow they keep winning.

THOMAS SCHALLER, professor University of Maryland :: The irony is that today the government has far more power than in the past. It is a much larger part of the economy, and so when it moves a lever, it can expect a dramatic effect.

PHILLIPS :: And yet people increasingly seem to believe that their votes don't matter, that these parties aren't any different from each other. It's all just a big game. Democrats are the not-Republicans and Republicans are the non-Democrats. And if None Of The Above could be on the ballot, it would scare the bejesus out of everybody. What a choice that would be!

“He gives me hope,” Ms. Husaini said in an interview last month, shortly before she joined the campaign on a fellowship. But she sighed when the conversation turned to his denials of being Muslim, “as if it’s something bad,” she said.

Throughout the primaries, Muslim groups often failed to persuade Mr. Obama’s campaign to at least send a surrogate to speak to voters at their events, said Ms. Ghori, of the Muslim Public Affairs Council.

Before the Virginia primary in February, some of the nation’s leading Muslim organizations nearly canceled an event at a mosque in Sterling because they could not arrange for representatives from any of the major presidential campaigns to attend. At the last minute, they succeeded in wooing surrogates from the Clinton and Obama campaigns by telling each that the other was planning to attend, Mr. Bray said.

American Muslims have experienced a political awakening in the years since Sept. 11, 2001. Before the attacks, Muslim political leadership in the United States was dominated by well-heeled South Asian and Arab immigrants, whose communities account for a majority of the nation’s Muslims. (Another 20 percent are estimated to be African-American.) The number of American Muslims remains in dispute as the Census Bureau does not collect data on religious orientation; most estimates range from 2.35 million to 6 million.

A coalition of immigrant Muslim groups endorsed George W. Bush in his 2000 campaign, only to find themselves ignored by Bush administration officials as their communities were rocked by the carrying out of the USA Patriot Act, the detention and deportation of Muslim immigrants and other security measures after Sept. 11.

As a result, Muslim organizations began mobilizing supporters across the country to register to vote and run for local offices, and political action committees started tracking registered Muslim voters. The character of Muslim political organizations also began to change.

“We moved away from political leadership primarily by doctors, lawyers and elite professionals to real savvy grass-roots operatives,” said Mahdi Bray, executive director of the Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation, a political group in Washington. “We went back to the base.”

In 2006, the Virginia Muslim Political Action Committee arranged for 53 Muslim cabdrivers to skip their shifts at Dulles International Airport in Northern Virginia to transport voters to the polls for the midterm election. Of an estimated 60,000 registered Muslim voters in the state, 86 percent turned out and voted overwhelmingly for Jim Webb, a Democrat running for the Senate who subsequently won the election, according to data collected by the committee.

More than six in 10 African Americans now rate race relations as "not so good" or "poor," while 53 percent of whites hold more positive views. Opinions are also divided along racial lines, though less so, on whether blacks face discrimination.

Many think Obama has the potential to transform current racial politics. Nearly six in 10 believe his candidacy will shake up the racial status quo, for better or worse.

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African Americans are much more optimistic than whites on this score: Sixty percent said Obama's candidacy will do more to help race relations, compared with 38 percent of whites.

...Fox is not a news network, the only difference between them and The Daily Show is that most people, or rather most people that I know, don't find their sense of humor funny. It's one thing to poke fun at racism and xenophobia like Colbert and Stewart sometimes do, but it's completely something else to perpetually peddle racist and xenophobic viewpoints.

There are four million or more of these so-called disconnected youths across the country. They hang out on street corners in cities large and small -- and increasingly in suburban and rural areas.


If you ask how they survive from day to day, the most likely response is: "I hustle," which could mean anything from giving haircuts in a basement to washing a neighbor's car to running the occasional errand.

Or it could mean petty thievery or drug dealing or prostitution or worse.

Speaking to a group of businessmen at his office, Mr. Lee gave his first comment on the massive rally against his four-month-old government that brought at least 100,000 people into the streets of Seoul on Tuesday and prompted his entire cabinet to offer to resign.

The beef protests have dealt a sharp blow to Mr. Lee, who was elected in December championing a new “pragmatic” approach to ties with Washington.

He made rebuilding South Korea’s political and economic alliance with the United States his top priority, while taking a much harder line on North Korea than his predecessor, Roh Moo-hyun.

Bush administration officials have expressed hopes that Mr. Lee’s firm stance on North Korea’s nuclear program, which reversed South Korea’s previous policy to embrace its neighbor, could persuade the North to end its nuclear program. North Korea promised to dismantle its nuclear weapons facilities under an international accord that has yet to achieve lasting results.

Both Mr. Lee and President Bush also hoped that Mr. Lee’s decision in April to end the five-year ban on American beef would help win support in Congress for a free-trade agreement struck between the governments last year, thus improving relations while helping to revive the sluggish South Korean economy.

But some South Korean analysts say Mr. Lee may now come under pressure to take a less accommodating line with Washington.

Mr. Lee was himself a former student activist imprisoned by the country’s then military regime. During the current protests, many student protesters called Mr. Lee “authoritarian” and in his comments Wednesday the president appeared to have understood the irony.

“As a former participant in a pro-democracy student movement myself, I had many thoughts watching yesterday’s demonstration," Mr. Lee was quoted as saying by his office. "My government intends to have a new beginning with a new resolution."

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Seoul reverberated with antigovernment slogans until well past midnight. While people marched by candlelight, loudspeakers blared the songs South Koreans used to sing during their struggle against the military dictators of the 1970s and 1980s.

The protests Tuesday took place on the 21st anniversary of the huge pro-democracy demonstrations that helped end authoritarian rule. Overhead, balloons carried banners that said "Judgment day for Lee Myung-bak" and "Renegotiate the beef deal." One widely distributed leaflet said, "Mad cow drives our people mad!"

The agriculture minister, Chung Won-chun, visited the protest site to offer an apology in a speech, but protesters quickly surrounded him, chanting "Traitor!" and he was forced to leave.

Mr. Lee urged the police and protesters to avoid clashes. He promised to be "humble before the people’s voices" and called for national unity to overcome an economic crisis spawned by stagnant growth and surging prices for oil and other raw materials.

Garnette ...New Orleans is both a place and idea. Moreover, as place and idea, people like to think of it as difference. You, however, insist that it’s both a peculiar and representative American spot.

Ned Not merely a peculiar spot, but the logical outcome of competing international forces.

GC Your argument, then, is that New Orleans is at the crux of America’s…

NS At the absolute crossroads of American history! Over and over again. Including now.

GC New Orleans—distinctly American and singularly un-American!

NS I use the word “American” in its larger sense, always, so I think it’s extremely American. It’s the most American city in a lot of ways.

GC Other cities can justifiably make that claim. Your fellow New Yorkers, among others, will surely take you to task. How is New Orleans the most American?

NS The most fully realized, in that it participated in all of the waves of culture that rolled across the hemisphere, practically. The French, the Spanish, the Anglo-American, each of which was associated with a different black wave: the Bambara, the Bakongo, the Baptists. From 1769 to 1803—that was a transcendental moment in history, the last third of the 18th century—Spain held Louisiana during the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions, three events of maximum impact on world history, and each of which affected Louisiana vitally. During the Spanish period, New Orleans became a city. It became a port of importance. I think that there are a variety of reasons, which I discuss in the book, why the Spanish years in New Orleans have been so consistently underplayed in importance, but I see them as absolutely crucial to understanding the town.

GC And New Orleans itself is crucial to understanding America. After all, its history is replete with the perennial American themes and struggles: self-making, liberty, equality, immigration, pluralism, religion, the tension between Europe and America, the influence of the South, and so on. And, of course: frontier.

NS New Orleans was the Wild West! In many ways, it never stopped being the Wild West. A place where you might see a gunfight on a main street. You still might see that. It had that image from very early on. When Thomas Jefferson annexed it, it went from being El Norte, the northernmost edge of the Saints and Festivals Belt, to being the West. We often think of it as the South, but you have to think of the Civil War in terms of both the South and the West, because a primary determinant in forcing the issue of civil was whether or not slave traders could expand their markets into the new western territories, the ones beyond New Orleans. DeBow’s Review, the Fortune magazine of the slaveowning South, published in New Orleans, was DeBow’s Review of the South and the West. New Orleans was the South and West.

Garnette: Picking up on your idea of perception…there are few ideas as central to the American character as renewal and transformation—as Ted Widmer brilliantly shows in Ark of the Liberties: America and the World, “[W]hat idea has been more powerful in [America’s] history than the hope that something wonderful…waits over the next horizon?”—and what is New Orleans if not a place of renewal and transformation? (Though I can already hear a host of people objecting that this Babylon of a place is anything but!) In your book you emphasize how music is crucial to the city’s formation and renewal; for you, music is a skeleton key that unlocks New Orleans’s history and reveals its character.

Ned: Absolutely. I look at music as a key to understanding history. In my books I use music as a tool for reading history, and vice versa...

Read the whole interview here.

It's hard to think of what would turn off whites quicker than playing the thin-skinned victim.

A woman educated at Yale and Wellesley who can afford to lend her campaign $20 million becomes the standard-bearer for working-class white people? She's clearly not a coal miner's daughter. So how did she do this? She appealed to their most base racial fears and resentments. It's worth remembering that Clinton started the race with a large base of black support. Then she made it easy for black women to abandon her.