First, stop watching movies as ethnic people and start watching them as white people. There's nothing that white people like more than seeing other white people in movies and on television. When you go to the movies with your ethnic "judgment" eyes, you miss my point. Watch as a white person, and suddenly your outrage turns to understanding and laughter.

Take a minute to walk to your limousine in my Gucci shoes, and you'll realize that I'm just trying to make people smile. Mickey Rooney with buckteeth and a crazy accent in "Breakfast at Tiffany's"? It's so much funnier than finding a real Chinese actor just talking like himself. Then you'd have to get a screenwriter to actually write genuinely funny lines for that character. You get so much more comedy bang with buckteeth and a funny accent. I mean, it made me laugh. Many people, including myself, were also convinced that Charlton Heston truly was a Mexican/Native American/Egyptian/Ape who talked to God. And I think I convinced a lot of Asians that Genghis Khan really did look like John Wayne back in the '60s. "Short Circuit" was one of my biggest hit movies and I was completely convinced that Fisher Stevens was Indian. Who knew he was a Jewish guy from New York? That accent was spot on!

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But beyond just being a novel, tongue-in-cheek use of technology, "Dudes From Views" raises interesting questions about the subtle ground between what one might call voyeurism -- secretly taking pictures of attractive, half-naked people and posting them in a public space -- and public information. To get more insight into this Big Brother-meets-peepshow hybrid, Salon corresponded with the blog's creator, Brad, over email, about his method, issues of privacy and the Google gaze. Click above for a slide show of images from the site.

How did you come up with the idea for Dudes From Views?

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That's how Brian Williams tagged a recent NBC Nightly News report on this year's extreme weather. Floods, droughts, wildfires and tornadoes dominated the news many nights in 2011. Even this week, weather forecasters are keeping tabs on reports from coastal villages in Alaska, like Kivalina, which is under a coastal flood warning from "one of the most severe storms on record” packing hurricane-force winds while it pushes up the Northwest Alaska coast. Lack of protective Arctic sea ice – which is disappearing because of climate change – is making the surge from storms like this more dangerous. Kivalina's very existence is threatened due to flooding and erosion fueled by climate change, and the Native Alaskan community struggles to relocate. It's no wonder the Inuit have a word for the changing weather -- "uggianaqtuq" -- which roughly translates into "stranger." As in "the weather has become a stranger.”

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Some of the posters are provocative, explicit or overtly sexual; others are straightforward, tame -- even prudish. Some rely on shock-and-awe tactics to make a general point; others offer detailed advice for HIV protection. Some, created in the 1980s or '90s, are already very clearly dated; others are triumphs of evergreen design. All offer glimpses of past understandings of the disease, its dangers and its prevalence.

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As the Occupy Wall Street movement has zeroed in on the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans who dominate politics, the geography of American wealth and poverty displays a slightly more complicated picture. Some of the country's richest counties are flourishing as bastions of the upper middle class or just plain rich -- but not necessarily of the super rich. These are already well-to-do areas where median income has grown since the recession began in 2007. In this sample, only one, Rockland County, N.Y., is partially fueled by Wall Street money.

The others, selected for geographic and economic diversity,  embody the contradictions of a country that often rejects government rhetorically while embracing it practically.

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How George Carranco wound up in Slab City, a squattersville at the end of the earth, is a story for these hard times.

Carranco, an ex-Marine and jack-of-all-trades, lost his job at a factory in San Diego when it shut down, lost his apartment when he couldn't pay the rent, lost his temporary home when the city towed his van, and lost the van for good when the parking fees climbed to unattainable heights. More than a thousand dollars -- might as well have been a million.

Three years of bad breaks later, Carranco had had enough. He revived an '83 Dodge camper that he picked up for free and, with his girlfriend and five Chihuahuas, headed east, 155 miles from San Diego, to where the roads give up and the desert takes over.

Unwittingly, the 56-year-old Carranco had joined the latest wave of migrants to Slab City: refugees of the recession. Beaten down by a brutal economy, they're straggling to this desolate outpost of societal dropouts to recover their wits and duck the national malaise.

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"There is so little reality documented in photography today," de Sinéty's teacher and mentor Mary Ellen Mark writes in the introduction to the catalog that accompanies the Portland Museum's exhibition. "In contrast, Madeleine's work is a tribute to those moments in life that are truly real." You can see for yourself how handsome that reality is, in the slide show that follows.

"[When] I started, [I was] totally ignoring everything about photography," de Sinéty tells me on the phone. "I started [taking pictures] because I loved steam engines, and I wanted to document the last steam engines running in Europe ... I just pushed the button when I saw that things seemed to be right." Her favorite subjects, she says, are "all people living simple lives, with no big machines, or things like that. People who live close to the earth, their whole life -- not connected with the industrial world. It's a world which disappears; fewer and fewer people will be able to live that way."

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I'd go into more detail here about the art of underacting, but that would be contrary to the spirit of the enterprise, now, wouldn't it? Better to just get on with it.

I think you know good underacting when you see it, and I hope you'll list your own nominees for the Underacting Hall of Fame in the Letters section.

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This slide show will try to remedy that sad state of affairs. Going beyond the standard Emmy categories -- and invoking the spirit of the MTV Movie Awards but not its consistently awful taste -- we're handing out laurels in 10 categories not recognized by the Emmys: best individual episode of a drama, comedy and unscripted series; best monologue; best love scene; best comedy sequence; best cameo; best death scene; best action sequence; and best monster.

My eligibility period is the same as that of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences: June 1, 2010, through May 21, 2011. If the program did not air between those dates, I did not consider it for inclusion in this slide show. So if you're wondering why there are no awards for "Breaking Bad," that's the reason -- the same reason it's not up for any Emmys on Sunday.

I hope you'll list your own favorites in these categories -- and maybe devise some new categories! -- in the Letters section.

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And so it has gone ever since. Two hundred years ago attacks were spread with hand-printed pamphlets distributed door-to-door. Today they take the form of thirty-second sound bites going viral on the Internet. Still, style and content have held remarkably steady over time. Charges of corruption, incompetence, warmongering, elitism, stupidity, immorality, lack of patriotism, wasting public money — the details change with each election cycle, but the themes remain the same.

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These images were captured while working as a staff photographer for an English-language newspaper based in Abu Dhabi. Through my daily assignments I became fascinated with the delicate balance many of these women wield, between the religious obligations of their home life, and an emerging culture of high fashion and opulent living. While a woman’s right to work, serve in the military and pursue higher education is protected by a relatively new constitution, domestic life and social conduct is governed by Shariah law -- a strict Islamic moral code. Through foreign investment and tourism, the idea of the egalitarian woman is slowly developing, but still remains largely confined to the urban centers and upper-class circles.

I witnessed women experimenting with a newly acquired freedom, pursuing their careers and dreams while toeing the line of modesty and upholding respect for their family name. In a city fueled by money and power, sometimes these two ideas, from an outside perspective, seemed to be contradictory. I watched a city being carved out of the sand, and this was just a small glimpse into some of the lives affected by and embracing change in this tiny Arab nation.

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The first installment of this series covered work that appeared in the immediate aftermath of the attacks; because so much of it was in production before the catastrophe, any associations between the work and recent events were likely to be coincidental, maybe more in the eye of the beholder than in the work itself. Starting in mid- to late 2002, though, we started to see more books, TV series, films and music that were meant as a response to the attacks: Bruce Springsteen's "The Rising," for instance, and Spike Lee's "The 25th Hour." By the time 2004 rolled around, pop culture seemed to have moved past the "can't we all just get along and grieve together?" stage. There was more work, and more statements, of an overtly political nature -- work that was explicitly designed to provoke discussions, maybe even start fights. We've collected a few memorable examples here; we hope you'll add your own picks to the Letters section.

The final installment of this series, covering 2005-2010, will run next Friday.

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These are but a few of the items featured in this week's slide show, which recounts the last three months of 2001 by looking at the popular culture that reflected it -- sometimes on purpose, sometimes by accident.

The criteria for this week's slide show are a bit slipperier than usual, because for once we're not talking about best this or worst that; we're talking about items in a fairly narrow slice of recent American history -- the titles of individual works and events that you think about when you remember what it was like to be alive in America in the weeks after the 9/11 attacks. Some of the items were specifically designed to respond to the trauma -- the telethon benefiting survivors, for example, and the New York Times' "Portraits of Grief" series. Other items seemed, often mysteriously, to reflect that strange, sad time even though they had been in the works for months or years before their release.

This is a big subject, so of course we might have left off something that had an impact on you -- a book, film, television program or piece of music that you think about when you think about the weeks that followed 9/11. And that's what the Letters section is for, so join us there.

Next Friday we'll publish a bigger sequel to this slide show that covers the rest of a long, strange decade.

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Many cultures have rites of passage that could qualify as extreme sports. Bungee jumping is rooted in the ritual jumping in Vanuatu that takes place as a fertility rite during the yam harvest. Young men climb to the top of a wooden tower to dive off with vines tied around their ankles, hoping to just graze the ground. In the 1970s, Oxford University's Dangerous Sports Club tested the idea from a bridge with more modern equipment and the new sport spread to New Zealand, the spiritual home of the world's adrenaline junkies and their boundary-expanding guru, A.J. Hackett.

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This list includes a number of chameleon-like character actresses, some offbeat leading ladies and at least one world-class clown. My admittedly arbitrary cutoff point is an Oscar or Emmy win; if a performer has taken home at least one statuette, she didn't make my list, because she could no longer be considered "underrated." But you may have different criteria, and I hope that as we list other great, underappreciated actresses in the Letters section, we'll have a spirited argument about what, exactly, "underrated" means, and whether all these 10 performers qualify.

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Christopher Rozzi has taken the idea of those secret confessionals one step further. On his Etsy site, Tiny Confessions, he sells drawings of the world's most adorable pets airing the same sort of self-doubts that led you to buy a cute little Shih Tzu in the first place. If you're the kind of person who feels like your cat is secretly judging you, then Rozzi's work is right up your alley. I posed five questions to the New York-based comedian in the hopes of alleviating my fears that deep down, my dog doesn't love me as much as he seems to. 

1. What's your profession, and how old are you? Where are you located? (The basics.)

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For every Mecca, Lourdes, Fatima and Bodh Gaya, there are hundreds of smaller, lesser-known sites around the world. That they are often quirky and surreal -- and draw a modern-day cast of characters diverse and colorful enough for countless tales -- is all part of the pilgrimage construct. These 14 places run the gamut, from mountaintops to a lotus flower behemoth to a tiny chapel dedicated to dogs.

You can find many more places of pilgrimage on Trazzler.

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