NEWSBYTARA KYLE

With all the recent recession-driven chatter about whether a bachelor's degree is still worth it, the age-old problem of book fees topping a grand a year isn't helping.

Let's say we accept the presumption that college still holds value, for all those romantic, values-conscious reasons that become harder to accept as gospel in times demanding pragmatism.

Congress'  Higher Education Opportunity Act is now requiring schools to go much further in making textbook costs transparent at the time of registration. But just knowing that Multivariable Calculus is too expensive doesn't do much good when it's critical to Janie's future.

How do we make absorbing Kierkegaard or Kant, applied mathematic or organic chemistry, economically viable for all students?

David Lewis at The Chronicle of Higher Education has a good piece examining the search for new business models, including the rise of textbook rental companies. Even more exciting, he highlights start-ups like Flat World Knowledge that are offering some tomes free on the web, and others for sale in digital formats like MP3 and PDF that drop the cost of paper.

Let's say it's your job to articulate issues, to curate art or to manage fashions.

Now let's say also that you, your peers, your co-workers and employer all come from a certain rarefied frame of reference. You grew up, if not outright wealthy, then at least "comfortably" upper middle class.

A story in the July issue of the UK's Tatler magazine called "The Interns: Never Have So Many Battled to Get Coffee for So Few," and summarized at The Times Online, argues that the fields of media, art and fashion are increasingly being populated by children of the affluent and influential. When internships — foot-in-the-door positions that allow young people to begin to climb their aspirational ladders — aren't outright bought "in a social bidding war" at charity auctions, they are secured through behind-the-scenes peddling. Perhaps sadder still, the article surmises that credit for a recent rise in these habits should go to the Teen Vogue exploits of MTV star Whitney Port, as seen on The Hills.

Even without these sort of shenanigans, the simple lack of a paycheck creates a pretty major barrier of entry for many would-be coffee runners.

Stateside, we certainly know how to sell an internship too. Recall the $9,000 collected for an internship by The Huffington Post (which does not pay a dime to the majority of its contributors) last month, or Vogue's $42,500 windfall. In fairness, proceeds from both companies did go to benefit the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights. All admiration for their generosity aside, I still wish Vogue and HuffPo would find a way to give back without compromising what should be core principles.

They say that other version of "football," the one without the Super Bowl, doesn't mean as much in the United States. That despite the mania it inspires abroad, soccer's popularity here stays eclipsed by the NFL, NBA, MLB.

But when the World Cup kicks off next week, something potentially transformative will happen in our sports bars and living rooms.

The greatest passions exhibited in America will come from the greatest extremes of our socio-economic spectrum.

Impoverished immigrant and Latino communities will rock with enthusiasm on June 11. But so will upscale white suburbs.

The missing middle class is precisely what makes soccer hard to market in the U.S., argues Toby Miller of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Can you sell the same sports drinks, athletic gear and news pages in the barrios of southern California as behind the gates of North Shore Chicago? If not, outside of World Cup season, is the sport worth promoting at all?

In Los Angeles alone, Miller points out that there are an estimated 200 unaffiliated adult leagues field teams, with membership totaling half a million strong. Without the funds to join the national system, clubs like these aren't indexed in tallies of the sport's popularity. We may, however, be reaching a tipping point, Miller notes. With an estimated 48 million Latinos expected to be identified in the new 2010 Census — compared to 35 million in Census 2000 (pdf) — their interests may no longer be possible to ignore.

If you're familiar with the Mormon offshoot Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), perhaps from John Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven, then you are probably familiar with its litany of controversies. The polygamous social structure and the incidents of domestic violence, the rape convictions of sect leader Warren Jeffs and his systematic excommunication of male rivals.

What you may not be familiar with is the economic hardship facing the community's hundreds of under-aged exiles.

Last week, during the Tribeca Film Festival, I saw a documentary that put the plight of these teens into sharp focus. Sons of Perdition, which had its world premiere at the festival (watch the trailer here) follows a group of boys who leave "the Crick" (pictured), the nickname for the FLDS compounds of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona.

When FLDS teens are kicked out of or flee the Crick, typically for St. George, Utah, they are cut off completely from their parents and siblings. In addition to the psychological trauma of banishment, and the fear they hold for sisters who may be married off in their early teens, they are confronted with figuring out how to survive in mainstream society.

"It's like taking a kid from Somalia and putting him in downtown L.A. They don't know how to apply for jobs, don't know how to balance a checkbook," one person in the film's trailer points out. "They don't even know what a checking account is."

In a place where a gallon of water costs over $9 and poverty levels are twice the statewide average, imagine confronting the well over $100 million cost of transplanting your entire community miles away.

That's the dilemma facing tiny Shishmaref, Alaska. This village of around 600 is, along with other tiny Alaskan coastal communities such as Kivalina (pictured), Shaktoolik, Unalakleet and Newtok, at the forefront of the global climate crisis.

Shishmaref sits on an island just three miles long and only a quarter mile wide. For the past decade, the Chukchi Sea has been slowly swallowing Shishmaref. That's happening at a rate of 25-50 feet of land per winter storm, according to Brice Eningowuk of the Shishmaref Erosion and Relocation Committee in an interview with Conducive Magazine.

These Arctic villages were formerly protected by sea ice and permafrost, but warming temperatures are reducing these natural storm barriers at an alarming rate. Sea walls constructed in Hail Mary efforts to protect Shishmaref have repeatedly failed.

On Earth Day, it's vital that we remember that one of the great injustices of climate change is that the first places impacted are in many cases communities already at the margins of societies.

Hunger, provoked by aging, bad luck, addiction, natural disaster or other trauma, is the subject of a great interview at NPR with photographer Michael Nye.

Nye just wrapped an exhibit, "About Hunger and Resilience," at San Antonio's Witte Museum that featured a set of black and white portraits of those affected by hunger collected over a five-year journey documenting hunger in America. Each photograph is paired with a three to five-minute audio clip from its subject.

"One of the premises behind this project is a profound belief that everyone knows something that no one else knows, a wisdom about hunger," Nye told NPR.

Photography in general, and portrait photography in particular, has a unique ability to provoke empathy, to help us imagine another sort of life. A still image allows us to stare into the faces of people with experiences very different from our own for much longer than politeness typically permits.

I'm reminded of another photographer, Dawoud Bey, who, for those of you in the D.C. area, just opened a new exhibit at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Va. Until August 6, Bey is showing 40 full-scale portraits of teens from a variety of socioeconomic statuses.

That's something he's made it his mission to do for over 15 years. Speaking to an old friend of mine at FLYP Media in 2008, Bey recalled one girl, Odalys, who was 17 and pregnant with her second child. Odalys wanted to be remembered, not simply noticed as "the little pregnant girl." She wanted to be a doctor, Bey said, she was "still trying to keep her own dream alive, see beyond that."

When the National Urban League released its annual State of Black America report last week, its message had the unpleasant flavor of familiarity.

At a D.C. press conference, vice president of research Dr. Valerie Rawlston Wilson read directly from the League's inaugural 1976 report, citing an urgent need for job creation.

"There is a sense of déja vu, particularly back in 1975 when the economy dipped and declined," the League's president and CEO Marc H. Morial told The Root.

Back in the mid-70s, when an oil crisis prompted the last great recession, the poverty rate among African Americans hovered above 30 percent. Over the course of that decade, the number of African Americans living in extremely poor inner-city neighborhoods grew by 164 percent, in contrast to just 24 percent for whites. (By comparison, the African American poverty rate was about 25 percent in 2008, before the worst of the recession took hold, according to the Census Bureau.)

In 2009, black unemployment neared 15 percent, compared to nine percent of whites. That's far above the 1990s low of seven percent. It's also nearly four times higher than Morial's target rate of four percent.

Not only are African Americans disproportionately impacted by unemployment, but they also make up a disproportionate share of people out of work from six months or upwards of a year, according to a March report by Congress's Joint Economic Committee.

Pop quiz: Say you, like another 9.7 percent of Americans, find yourself unemployed.

Are you better off spending that extra 40 (plus!) hours per week: A.) blitzing out resumes, taking care of your health and home with more time for sleep and chores, or B.) doing those same tasks that used to pay you $20k, $40k, $100k each year for ... nothing?

Demeaning though the prospect may initially seem, a column at Science makes a compelling argument for emphasizing option B.

While you can't find a job without looking for one, devoting all of your energies to a hunt that may, in today's economy, stretch months longer than in more prosperous times, is a recipe for heartache and missed opportunities.

Putting a portion of that time instead toward "volunteering" your old services, whether they involved investment analysis or market research, social work or teaching, has a couple of benefits. Most importantly, it keeps your own skills sharp and marketable to prospective employers. Expertise is harder to argue after six months of couch surfing (or, for that matter, working odd jobs). But there's also a social value, because the more jobs that get cut, the more extra work is available to be done.

And while lean times don't leave most of us brimming with altruism, the fact is that volunteering (for your old employer or otherwise), or offering to work as a benefit-free contractor, keeps you in the spotlight for when money for new hires returns.

While we cautiously celebrate the high voter turnout in Iraq's elections last week, we'd do well to remember that we have another very big obligation -- to Iraqi refugees living right here in America.

Because theirs is a story we're fast forgetting.

A 2009 study by the International Rescue Committee lambasted the U.S. refugee admissions program for "resettling Iraqi refugees into poverty." Interviews with Iraqis in Phoenix and Atlanta found that unemployment was normative. Children go without basic needs, rent goes unpaid and families face a very real threat of eviction and homelessness.

This winter, service workers in resettlement hubs like Houston and Detroit have continued to report insufficient government support in helping refugees access health care, education, housing and jobs. You know, those little things that keep families afloat.

The IRC report (PDF) maintains that in better times, the majority of refugees were matched to jobs within a few months. Today, even the most qualified, fluent English speakers struggle.

Blame the recession. You might also blame the recession for the fact that seven years after the start of the Iraq war, our attention span for the plight of Iraqis in America is a bit limited. We have a homegrown crisis now. We, too, are unemployed, underemployed, or facing frozen salaries. We're distracted. It's understandable. But it's not ok.

The isolated, impoverished villages of western Alaska are in the sports world spotlight this week. Mushers from across the globe (including, for the first time, a Jamaican) are zooming toward the finish of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, a 1,100-mile feat of endurance billed as the world's "last great race."

The pups run in commemoration of the 1925 journey of cartoon-minted hero Balto, a Siberian husky who stopped a diphtheria epidemic by transporting the antitoxin from Anchorage to Nome. It should take more than the spectacle of cute huskies zipping through snow drifts and subzero conditions, though, to get you to pay attention to tiny race-route communities like Koyuk and Nulato.

For all the massive changes Alaska has undergone in the 85 years since (statehood, a pipeline and Sarah Palin, to name a few), the state's 230 rural villages still lack sufficient access to employment, health care and education.

While Alaska's statewide poverty rate of nine percent is among the lowest in the country, the levels in remote western boroughs like Nome, Wade-Hampton and Bethel are over twice as high. These same areas, by the way, are populated in overwhelming majority by Alaska natives.

Energy costs are a major culprit. You might think a place so famously rich in fossil fuels that it cuts its residents an annual check just for living there would be immune from spiraling electric bills. But most Alaskan oil gets shipped down to West coast refineries, and these days, oil and natural gas sales in Alaska are tied to world commodity prices. Plus, in a state with lots of land but very few roads, transportation costs are steep.