Cameron Sinclair: After a long hiatus we are coming back. In September my organization, Architecture for Humanity acquired Worldchanging and all its assets. Starting in November we will begin to merge this site with Open Architecture Network to create a robust and informed network to bring solutions to global challenges to life.

I was the shy girl in high school. The one who didn't smile or join the clubs. The one who didn't get chosen for sports teams but had everyone trying to copy off her tests. The one who was, on the inside, desperately lonely. I couldn't wait to get out of high school; I stayed in my room and studied so I could get good grades and go to college to start my "real life." When I went away, I thought I would finally be able to reinvent myself. Or perhaps invent myself for the first time.

I'm startled to report that one of the darkest Russian films I've seen in a career of watching dark Russian films, Sergei Loznitsa's black-comic backwoods odyssey "My Joy," will actually play American theaters (no doubt briefly) before moving on to a somewhat longer life as a home-video cult object. This mordant, slow-motion horror film about a truck driver's journey into hell -- the title is 100 percent sardonic, maybe more so -- was the most unexpected and arresting picture in the 2010 Cannes competition. Despite what you might believe about that festival, audiences there generally flock to lighter fare, and few seemed to appreciate that "My Joy" had a bleak, grotesque, near-perfect poetry in its soul.

Earlier this week, Laura Miller and other Salon writers weighed in on books they'd like to see banned from school reading lists -- from "Lord of the Flies" ("Is it pure sadism [that makes teachers assign that book]?" asked Andrew O'Hehir) to "Ivanhoe," which went a fair way toward dulling Life editor Sarah Hepola's enthusiasm for high school English.

When you live in a place with a 50 percent divorce rate, is "till death do you part" even a realistic concept? In a radical rethinking of matrimony, Mexico City's assembly is mulling a proposed civil code reform that would enable the city to issue marriage licenses with time limits.

The 90,000 New Yorkers who control 99% of the city's wealth are completely segregated, geographically and intellectually, from everyone else in the city and the nation at large, so it's no surprise that they tend to be tone-deaf and blind to the inequities and frustrations and resentments of Regular Folk, but billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his charming and powerful partner Diana Taylor are really out-doing themselves in terms of blinkered elite thickheadedness these days.

In the wake of the extrajudicial killing of American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki and several other people in Yemen this week, we're faced (once again) with the realization that the United States Constitution has become a largely meaningless totem. It gets waved around enthusiastically by people on all sides of the political spectrum whenever it seems to serve their interests, but nobody pays much attention to what it actually says. Presumably President Obama, the military-intelligence establishment and the mainstream media are declaring Awlaki a special case. Thanks to the secret provisions of secret laws, he was deprived of all the rights of citizenship and not subject to the ordinary rule of law that extends back not merely to the Constitution but to the Magna Carta (at least).

The New York Times has a piece today about the strained-to-hostile personal relationships that Chris Christie enjoys with New Jersey's two Democratic senators, Frank Lautenberg and Robert Menendez. As the story makes clear, Christie's friction with Lautenberg is pretty straight-forward, but when it comes to Menendez, the history is a little more complicated:

Like most liberal Berkeley, Calif. residents, I am an avid follower of Southeastern Conference college football, which means I often find myself spending my lunch hour catching up on the latest news about tree poisonings in Auburn or Lane "Lame" Kiffen's cheating escapades at Tennessee. But it's just not every day that my consideration of LSU's awesome defensive line is interrupted by new revelations about the intersection of Deep South college football and the conservative right-wing campaign to demonize Barack Obama as the Socialist Bringer-of-Death.

For nearly a decade, Carol Tracy, the executive director of the Women's Law Project, has been agitating for a change in what she describes as the FBI's  "archaic" definition of rape.

Race in America is a difficult subject. When it comes to race, America has the mental maturity of a 7-year-old that, on occasion, will plug its ears with its fingers and sing "La, la, la." Being American and Negro I understand this. I don’t really have any choice but to understand it. I can’t decide that racial matters or discussions are silly because I’m actually affected. I can’t speak of it philosophically and talk racial theory because for me its NOT theory. I’m Black. This is real. End of story.

Randy Phillips is a 21-year-old American airman stationed at Ramstein Air Base in Germany. Areyousuprised is the Twitter and YouTube personality who, since last April, has been anonymously posting updates on his life as "Just an average GI, who happens to be gay." Phillips has a "conservative, more traditional ... hard to talk to" mom back home in Alabama. Areyousuprised shares his "It gets better" story, answers questions from subscribers, and tosses off wry observations like "Don't Ask, Don't Tell training was this morning. It was a great presentation that nobody listened to" and "It has been kinda awkward since I told my boss, but he has only called me faggot about twice since." Earlier this month, Phillips used the repeal of DADT to reveal that he and Areyousuprised are one and the same. He did it by coming out to his parents. On YouTube.

Peggy Noonan has diagnosed what is wrong with Barack Obama: He is too concerned with "telling stories," and not concerned enough with "leading." And Noonan should know, because she was a professional writer of stories for Ronald Reagan, the American president whose entire legacy is built around the fact that he was really super good at telling stories.

Miriam "Ma" Ferguson was the first woman governor of Texas. Like my own dear ma, she both hailed from Bell County, deep in the heart of the state, and graduated from Mary Hardin-Baylor College (now the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor in the fine town of Belton, Texas, long may they wave).

You measure your success in five-year increments. Your doctors let you know if your blood counts are high or low. You bite your lip, not sure if you want to know if you're stage 1, 2, 3 or 4. Cancer -- it's a numbers game. So when I went to Sloan-Kettering last week to discuss a drug that's effective in 30 percent of patients for my melanoma that has a roughly 10-20 percent survival rate , it didn't come as much of a surprise when my doctor said, noting proudly that I've lasted almost 14 months already, "The odds have been against you from the start."

The same U.S. military unit that got Osama bin Laden used a drone and jet strike in Yemen on Friday to kill an American-born cleric suspected of inspiring or helping plan numerous attacks on the United States, including the Christmas 2009 attempt to blow up a jetliner, U.S. officials said.

On "The Daily Show" last night, Jon Stewart took a look at the Occupy Wall Street protests that have swamped lower Manhattan for nearly two weeks. "Alright, I guess that is what democracy looks like, although, to be fair, it's also what Bonnaroo looks like," Stewart noted. All that changed, though, when a New York police officer pepper-sprayed what appeared to be a peaceful woman while the camera's were rolling earlier this week. Now all eyes are affixed on New York's Financial District, and on the cop in question -- veteran officer Anthony Bologna (a.k.a. Tony Bologna).

First, the news: The leading newspaper in New Jersey reported late Thursday night that Chris Christie "is seriously rethinking his months of denials and may launch a campaign for the White House after all."

The national trauma of the 2000 presidential election and its messy denouement in Florida and the U.S. Supreme Court made, for a brief moment, election reform a cause célèbre. The scrutiny of election administration went far beyond the vote counting and recounting that dominated headlines. The Florida saga cast a harsh light on the whole country's archaic and fragmented system of election administration, exemplified by a state where hundreds of thousands of citizens were disenfranchised by incompetent and malicious voter purges, Reconstruction-era felon voting bans, improper record-keeping, and deliberate deception and harassment.

Despite recent odes to "post-racial" sensibilities, persistent racial wage and unemployment gaps show that prejudice is alive and well in America. Nonetheless, that truism is often angrily denied or willfully ignored in our society, in part, because prejudice is so much more difficult to recognize on a day-to-day basis. As opposed to the Jim Crow era of white hoods and lynch mobs, 21st century American bigotry is now more often an unseen crime of the subtle and the reflexive -- and the crime scene tends to be the shadowy nuances of hiring decisions, performance evaluations and plausible deniability.