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Related: The Los Angeles Times on 'Biblezines'
Earlier:Worship and wholeness: the Calvin Symposium on Worship

From the New Republic:

RUHENGERI, Rwanda — The Rwandan Demobilization and Reintegration Center sprawls across a lush plateau near the northern town of Ruhengeri, just beneath the precipitous slopes of the 14,800-foot Mount Karisimbi volcano. With students playing pickup games of soccer and striding purposefully to class, it could be the tidy campus of a polytechnic academy. Yet it is here where some of the most hardened foot soldiers of the genocidal former Hutu regime … are being reeducated and reintroduced to Rwandan society after a decade in exile. "These men fought as mercenaries in the jungles of Africa for eight or nine years," Sam Barigye, a 29-year-old Tutsi who helps run the program, told me as we strolled across the grounds. "They've been brainwashed. They have been isolated. We are trying to tell them what really happened in this country." … As the tenth anniversary of the mass killing approaches, the Rwandan government is stepping up its campaign to compel its citizens to confront the truth about one of the twentieth century's greatest crimes.

From the New York Times :

BLACKPOOL, England — Thirty years ago, 17 million people a year braved frigid seas and draconian bed-and-breakfasts to make the city the working-class resort of the north. Today, with sunny Spain a cheap plane ride away, the number has plunged to 10.6 million. … To recapture its popularity, Blackpool is banking on legislation that would bring Vegas-style gambling resorts to Britain, where casinos are small, highly restricted and free of glitz. If it passes, as it is likely to in some form, Britain would become the first country in Europe to usher in American-style casinos, with their acres of slot machines, restaurants, shops and shows, a change that would significantly change how Britons gamble. … Although Blackpool is remarkably organized and single-minded in its courtship of casinos, it is not alone. The legislation has brought a frenzy of deals and counter deals in nearly every big city in Britain, so many in fact, that the government is torn between delight and distaste.

Related: Las Vegas as a mecca of capitalism, from The Nation

• What do you mean? The better question may be, why do you mean what you mean? In the early 20th century, Ferdinand de Saussure stated "that no word is inherently meaningful," says author Paul Greenburg in the Boston Globe's Idea's section. "Rather a word is only a 'signifier,' i.e. the representation of something, and it must be combined in the brain with the 'signified,' or the thing itself, in order to form a meaning-imbued 'sign.'" Thus semiotics was born. It flourished at Brown University, where students—such as radio host Ira Glass and others who would go on to contend for Pulitzers and Oscars—put culture under their microscope, looking for codes, messages and narratives. Greenburg looks at the legacy of those first semioticists—which includes the "constant irony" of popular culture's self-consciousness—and the rebirth of the discipline today as media studies. (Without semiotics, would we be talking about "alt-evangelicals"?) Story

Related:
Media scholars tuning in to radio's golden age, from the Chronicle of Higher Education
Jazz's influence on literature, from the Chronicle
Gulf between high and popular culture is growing (and irritating), says Anne Applebaum in the Washington Post

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