In 1995, journalist Frank Owen began researching a story on "Special K," a new designer drug that fueled the after-midnight club scene. He went to buy and sample the drug at the internationally-notorious Limelight, a decrepit church converted into a Manhattan disco, where pulse-pounding music, gender-bending dancers, and uninhibited sideshows attracted long lines of hopeful onlookers. Clubland is the story of Owen's six-year journey behind the velvet...

How hip hop shapes our conversations about race, and how race influences our consideration of hip hop. Hip hop is a distinctive form of black art in America, from Tupac to the Pulitzer Prize-winning Kendrick Lamar, hip hop has long given voice to the African American experience. As scholar and cultural critic Tricia Rose argues, hip hop, in fact, has become one of the primary ways we talk about race in the United States. But hip hop is in crisis....

"Starting in the early 1960s, there was fear in America about the proliferation of computer database and networking technologies. People worried that these systems were going to be used by both corporations and governments for surveillance and control. Indeed, the dominant cultural view at the time was that computers were tools of repression, not liberation -- and that included the ARPANET, the military research network that would grow into the Internet...