Summer reading should be easy to plow through. The last thing you want to do when you're sitting in a pool of sweat--or on a breezy beach--is to have to keep flipping back a page because you couldn't follow. If you have to struggle, you'll just end up taking a nap.

That doesn't mean you have to read trash. It just means the writing should be clean, compelling, and a little sexy--even if you're reading a cookbook.

With this criteria in mind, we submit our summer reading list, broken down by Smile and Act Nice categories. We'll add categories throughout the month of June.

The Nation
Contrary to what a lot of politicians, corporate raiders, and Young Republicans would have you believe, the American media is anything but liberal. Thankfully, there are some compelling exceptions. Turn to The Nation for an eye-opening weekly dose of real journalism. Formed by abolitionists in 1865, The Nation has stuck with that original intention statement for more than a century: "The Nation will not be the organ of any party, sect, or body. It will, on the contrary, make an earnest effort to bring to the discussion of political and social questions a really critical spirit, and to wage war upon the vices of violence, exaggeration, and misrepresentation by which so much of the political writing of the day is marred." They also have a fine website. -nikol lohr
thenation.com subscribe, read the online version & check out what today's headline politicians were doing a year ago in the archives.

The Baffler
A quarterly journal of ass-kicking social commentary essays, The Baffler presents social criticism and cultural study, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, sometimes bitter, usually damning. Whenever you start to forget what a big ugly, pathetic, corporate logo-emblazoned machine you're a part of, The Baffler will knock you back to your senses. -nikol lohr
thebaffler.com enjoy The Baffler's open disdain for the internet
baffler links sample some Thomas Frank & assorted Baffler essays
dusty groove subscribe or buy back issues & books

Adbusters
The ad industry has met its match in this slick, heavy-stock, pretty piece of eye candy. Adbusters fights fire with fire, using great design & slick slogans to bust the advertising swallowing up all of our public space and consciousness. In addition to the magazine & website, the Adbusters Media Foundation sponsors activist events like TV Turnoff Week and Buy Nothing Day. They also produce uncommercials & spoof ads for subversive insertion into mainstream media--when the networks and magazines will accept them. If you're lucky, you've seen their ads on your local stations. I remember being shocked off my ass seeing an ad for TV Turnoff Week on a major network a couple of years back. -nikol lohr
adbusters.com visit their site to preview the magazine, subscribe, join the Culture Jammers list, check out the uncommercials & spoof ads, or get information about their campaigns.

An Underground Education : The Unauthorized and Outrageous Supplement to Everything You Thought You Knew About Art, Sex, Business, Crime, Science, Medicine, and other Fields of Human Knowledge
Richard Zacks, 1997
All the juicy footnotes textbooks omit, and corrections to the traditional misinformation of education and popular culture. Told in compact segments that make it the perfect book for the nonreader, An Underground Education also makes a great bathroom book (hm? Father's Day present?). Choice tidbits: true crime, the real Mata Hari, Columbus' slave trade, prostitution, 20th century OTC narcotics, the yellow origins of respected American newspapers. -nikol lohr
amazon.com buy the book: paperback or hardcover.

20 Years of Censored News
Carl Jensen, 1997
It seems like everyone spent the last year talking about how Monicagate was wasting our time and diverting us from the real issues--without ever actually approaching what the real issues were. But just because it's not on MSNBC or CNN doesn't mean it's not news. Project Censored indicts this long-standing mainstream media pattern by locating and publicizing the top stories reported by the alternative press that the mainstream media downplays and ignores. Twenty Years of Censored News covers the first twenty years of Project Censored, which Carl Jensen started in 1976 as part of a mass media seminar at Sonoma State University. The foundation also publishes an annual yearbook of "the news that didn't make the news." For a taste of what you'll get in the book, their website offers summaries of the top ten censored news stories from 1989 to 1997. -nikol lohr
project censored website learn what the mainstream media chose not to tell you & join the Project Censored mailing list.
amazon.com buy the book or read an interview with the author