Contents: Making sense. Making sense through reading --
Making sense through writing --
Essays. "This is our world" / Dorothy Allison --
"Chicana artists: Exploring Nepantla, el Lugar de la Frontera" / Gloria Anzaldúa ---
"The owl has flown" / Sven Birkerts --
"A real class act: searching for identity in the classless society" / Julie Charlip --
"Progress and the bean" / Scott DeVeaux --
"Seeing" / Annie Dillard --
"The spectacle of science and self" / Julie English Early --
"The little man at Chehaw Station" / Ralph Ellison --
"The marriage between art and commerce" / Stuart Ewen --
"The transformation of everyday life" / Richard Florida --
"From the frying pan into the fire" / Arlie Russell Hochschild --
"keeping close to home: class and education / Bell Hooks --
"Landscape, drama, and dissensus: The rhetorical education of Red Lodge, Montana" / Zita Ingham --
"Second thoughts: the genetics of a brave new world?" / Michio Kaku --
"The historical structure of scientific discovery" / Thomas Kuhn --
"The lost art of argument" / Christopher Lasch --
"Introduction to Free culture / Lawrence Lessig --
"Scientific literacy, What it is, Why it's important, and why scientists think we don't have it" / Emily Martin ... et al. --
"Setting the record straight" / Scott McCloud --
"Bad eyes" / Erin McGraw --
"From outside, in" / Barbara Mellix --
"For authors, fragile ideas need loving every day" / Walter Mosley --
"The loss of the creature" / Walker Percy --
" 'Blaxicans' and other reinvented Americans" / Richard Rodriguez --
"Designs for escape" / Witold Rybczynski --
"Aerobic sisyphus and the suburbanized psyche" / Rebecca Solnit --
"I stand here writing" / Nancy Sommers --
"In Plato's cave" / Susan Sontag --
"The wall, the screen and the image: the Vietnam Veterans Memorial" / Marita Sturken --
"At the Buffalo Bill Museum, June 1988" / Jane Tompkins --
From "Science in an Old Testament style" / Christopher P. Toumey --
"From a native daughter" / Haunani-Kay Trask --
"Earth: nature and culture" / Yi-Fu Tuan --
From "The triumph of tinkering" / Sherry Turkle --
"Disney World: public use/private state" / Susan Willis --
"Imagination and reality" / Jeanette Winterson. Assignment sequences. Challenging the inertia of old ideas / (Toumey, Percy, Lessig, Hochschild) --
Seeing and knowing / (Percy, Winterson, Dillard) --
Reading art and culture / (Tompkins, Anzaldúa, Birkerts, Ewen) --
Using oneself as a source / (Rodriguex, McGraw, Allison, Sommers) --
Contradictions in class and classroom (hooks, Charlip, Ellison) --
History and memory / (Task, Tompkins, Struken) --
Democracy and debate / (Lasch, Ingham, Hochschild) --
Imagination, possibility, and control / (Winterson, Mosley, Willis, Toumey) --
Escapes / (Taun, Rybczynski, Solnit) --
Fragility and fruition / (DeVeaux, Mosley, and McCloud) --
Self-reflection and making sense / (Tompkins, hooks, Mellix) --
Technology and change (Sontag, Turkle, Kuhn, Lessig) --
Parts and wholes / (Lasch, Anzaldúa, Rodriguez) --
Writing on writing / (Sommers, Mellix, Early) --
The art of "reality" / (Winterson, Sturken, Kaku, Allison) --
The arts and sciences / (Toumey, Kuhn, Winterson, Ellison) --
Technology and understanding / (Sontag, Lasch, Turkle) --
Images and words / (Hochschild, Florida, Tuan, Charlip) --
Applying arguments and concepts / (Ewen, Willis, Percy) --
"Progress" in art and technology / (DeVeaux, Ewen, Birkerts) --
Rhetorical education / (Ingham, Florida, Martin ... et al.) --
What is scientific literacy? / (Martin ... et al., Toumey, Kaku) --
Visual literacy / (Sontag, McGraw, McCloud) --
The ways that thinking happens / Birkerts, Turkle, Solnit) --
Status, self, and authority / (Anzaldúa, Trask, Early).