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Alive Inside: How the Magic of Music Proves Therapeutic for Patients with Alzheimer’s and Dementia

Amy Goodman Democracy Now!
With advanced dementia, when people no longer can recognize their own family members, they stop speaking. But when they hear music that’s familiar from their youth, because those memories are preserved, they come alive. They connect with that. It’s a direct sort of a backdoor to that failing cognitive system right to the emotional system, which is really very much intact.

Poverty and Inequality, in Charts

Jared Bernstein The New York Times
Not only are we now faced with slower growth, but that lesser growth rate is much more narrowly distributed.

Left Out of Obama's Commission on Elections? Race

Brentin Mock Demos
The North Carolina state conference of the NAACP recently amended their voting rights complaint against the state arguing that the elimination of pre-registration would affect black and brown teens harder than their white peers because they otherwise have less opportunities to register to vote.

Needle

John Darkow Cagle

Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty

Jennifer M. Silva The Boston Globe
Book Review and Interview: Jennifer Silva's "Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty." In 100 in-depth, in-person interviews, she found a new working-class adult “bewildered in the labor market, betrayed by institutions, distrustful of love, disconnected from others, and committed to emotional growth.”

Bradley Manning Did Not Hurt the United States

Rainey Reitman Freedom of the Press Foundation
Bradley Manning didn't hurt us any more than a dentist hurts a patient when removing an abscessed tooth. The brief discomfort that resulted from the WikiLeaks disclosures was necessary to begin the process of healing and reform. It is a process that we do not yet know will be successful, but which began with Manning's decision to leak vital documents to WikiLeaks. And for that, we owe Manning thanks; no apologies necessary.

Egypt Crackdown - Reports and Analysis

Sharif Abdel Kouddous, and others
The violent clampdown by security forces has all but ended the possibility of a rapprochement with the Muslim Brotherhood. A cross section of Middle East analysts discuss the implications of the latest wave of violence in Egypt (in Al Jazeera)