Profiles everyday life in the settlement of Annawadi as experienced by a Muslim teen, an ambitious rural mother, and a young scrap metal thief, illuminating how their efforts to build better lives are challenged by religious, caste, and economic tensions.

Citing examples from New Orleans, Detroit, San Francisco and New York, a journalist describes the negative effects of ?gentrification? and reveals the destructive housing policies that are devised in corporate boardrooms and political back rooms across the country.

"Recognizing that an historic study of American racism and police violence should become part of today's canon, Jelani Cobb contextualizes it for a new generation. The Kerner Commission Report, released a month before Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1968 assassination, is among a handful of government reports that reads like an illuminating history book-a dramatic, often shocking, exploration of systemic racism that transcends its time. Yet Columbia University...

"Portuguese director Pedro Costa has been steadily building an impressive body of work since the late eighties, and these are the three films that put him on the map: spare, painterly portraits of battered, largely immigrant lives in the slums of Fontainhas, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Lisbon. In Ossos, after a suicidal teenage girl gives birth, she misguidedly entrusts her baby's safety to the troubled, deadbeat father. In Vanda's Room is...