Includes bibliographical references and index.

Machine generated contents note: -- 1. Work: What We Do -- Amy Reiter, "Why Being a Jerk at Work Pays" Daily Beast -- Elizabeth Dwoskin, "Why Americans Won't Do Dirty Jobs" Bloomberg Businessweek -- Julie Hanus, "White Collared: When Did Our Jobs Turn Into a Joke?" Utne Reader -- Patricia Ann McNair, "I Go On Running" -- Jason Storms, "In the Valley of the Shadow of Debt" -- Ross Perlin, "Of Apprentices and Interns" Lapham's Quarterly -- Christian Williams, "This, That, and the American Dream" Utne Reader -- Mike Rose, "Blue-Collar Brilliance" American Scholar -- 2. Consumerism: How We Spend -- Sara Davis, "Freshly Minted" The Smart Set -- David E. Procter, "The Rural Grocery Crisis" Daily Yonder -- Dan Heath and Chip Heath, "How to Pick the Perfect Brand Name" Fast Company -- Charles Kenny, "Haiti Doesn't Need Your Old T-Shirt" Foreign Policy -- Drew Harwell, "Honey Buns Sweeten Life for Florida Prisoners" St. Petersburg Times -- Sharon Begley and Jean Chatzky, "The New Science Behind Your Spending Addiction" The Daily Beast -- Sharon Angel, "Sorting Out Santa" -- Fredrik deBoer, "The Resentment Machine" The New Inquiry -- Damien Walter, "Sparks Will Fly" Aeon -- 3. Language: What We Mean -- Julie Traves, "The Church of Please and Thank You" This -- Richard Chin, "The Science of Sarcasm? Yeah, Right" Smithsonian -- Blake Gopnik, "Revolution in a Can" Foreign Policy -- Autumn Whitefield-Madrano, "Thoughts on a Word: Fine" The New Inquiry -- Juliette Kayyem,"Never Say, "Never Again" Foreign Policy -- Robert Lane Greene, "OMG, ETC" More Intelligent Life -- Fleda Brown, "Art and Buddhism: Looking for What's True" -- 4. Social Media: How We Communicate -- Lucy P. Marcus, "What It Means Today To Be 'Connected'" Harvard Business Review -- Steven Krause, "Living Within Social Networks" -- Cynthia Jones, "Lying, Cheating, and Virtual Relationships" Global Virtue Ethics Review -- Michael Erard, "What I Didn't Write About When I Wrote About Quitting Facebook" The Morning News -- Robert Fulford, "How Twitter Saved the Octothorpe" National Post -- Roger Scruton, "Hiding Behind The Screen" The New Atlantis -- James Gleick, "What Defines a Meme?" Smithsonian -- 5. Identity: Who We Are -- Sameer Pandya, "The Picture for Men: Superhero or Slacker" Pacific Standard -- Cristina Black, "Bathing Suit Shopping With Annette Kellerman, the Australian Mermaid" The Hairpin -- Doug LaForest, "Illegal Aliens" -- S. Alan Ray, "Despite the Controversy, We're Glad We Asked" Chronicle of Higher Education -- Eboo Patel, "Is Your Campus Diverse?" Chronicle of Higher Education -- Leila Ahmed, "Reinventing the Veil" FT Magazine -- 6. Entertainment: What We Watch, How We Listen -- Laura Bennett, "Fallon and Letterman and the Invisible Late Show Audience" The New Republic -- Richard Lawson and Jen Doll, "Lies Hollywood Told Us: Love and Romance Edition" The Atlantic Wire -- Stefan Babich, "The Fall of the Female Protagonist in Kids' Movies" Persephone -- Amanda Marcotte, "The Shocking Radicalism of 'Brave'" American Prospect -- Steve Yates, "The Sound of Capitalism" Prospect -- 7. Nature: How We Share the Planet -- Jerry Dennis, "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" Excerpt from From a Wooden Canoe -- Stephanie Mills, "Some Words for the Wild" from Tough Little Beauties -- Hugh Pennington, "Bug-Affairs" London Review of Books -- Robert Moor, "Mother Nature's Sons" N+1 -- Rob Dunn, "Fly On Wall Sees Things It Wishes It Hadn't" Scientific American -- David P. Barash, "Two Cheers for Nature" Chronicle of Higher Education -- Michael Shellenberger and Ted Norhaus, "Evolve" Orion -- 8. Politics: How We Govern -- Jeremy Brechner, "The 99 Percent Organize Themselves" The Nation -- David Korten, "When Bankers Rule the World" Yes Magazine -- Deanna Isaacs, "The Transnational Economy" The Chicago Reader -- Starhawk, "A Pagan's Response to the Affordable Healthcare Act" Dirt Worship -- David R. Dow, "We Stop the Next Aurora Not With Gun Control But With Better Mental Health Treatment" Daily Beast -- Janice Brewer, "Letter from Governor Janice Brewer to President Barack Obama" -- Kat Langdale, "The Illogical World of US Immigration" -- 9. War: How We Fight -- Doug Stanton, "What the Water Dragged In" New York Times -- Benjamin Busch, "U.S. Soldier Afghan Rampage Tears at Our National Soul" Daily Beast -- Emily Chertoff, "Occupy Wounded Knee" The Atlantic -- Nick Turse, "A Six-Point Plan for Global War" TomDispatch -- Neal Whitman, "'Kinetic' Connections" Visual Thesaurus -- Chris Hedges, "War Is Betrayal" Boston Review -- Tom Malinowski, Sarah Holewinski, and Tammy Schultz, "Post-Conflict Potter" Foreign Policy -- Appendix: Researching and Writing About Culture.

"Read. Write. Oxford. Culture: A Reader for Writers presents work from a broad spectrum of writers who are adapting to cultural trends. It takes on key issues including work, consumerism, language, social media, identity, entertainment, nature, politics, technology, and war. Ranging from defending the status quo to embracing uncertainty, the writers give voice to the discomfort and hope that accompanies change. The articles embody a range of responses demonstrated by various writing styles, political leanings, and grammatical conventions from publications outside of the U.S. By showing the various ways in which people express themselves about shared issues, the reader encourages students to understand how similar we are despite cultural differences. The photo galleries nestled between chapters give shape and imagery to the subjects discussed in the readings. Developed for the freshman composition course, Culture: A Reader for Writers includes an interdisciplinary mix of public, academic, and scientific reading selections, providing students with the rhetorical knowledge and compositional skills required to participate effectively in academic and public conversations about culture and change. Culture: A Reader for Writers is part of a series of brief single-topic readers from Oxford University Press designed for today's college writing courses. Each reader in this series approaches a topic of contemporary conversation from multiple perspectives"--

"The Culture Reader is part of the Managed Reader Program, which are a cluster of single-topic readers that are brief-to-medium in length and include a short section on rhetorical strategies and research work, as well as writing process, and all of which have a common pedagogy. The readings in these books include global perspectives and non-mainstream sources, and they are a manageable size. This book is a contemporary American culture (most readings published in 2010 or later), multi-genre reader with a pedagogical apparatus focused on critical reading"--