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Rap and Hip hop has evolved tremendously since its inception. The collective genre has been catapulted to global influence, where in the United States it represents the largest genre based on market share. After reviewing the history of rap music there is a perceived relationship between hip hop and authenticity. To which the question arose of whether hip hop could maintain authenticity in a commercial sphere. To explore this relationship, after reviewing the literature on authenticity, a model of analysis created by Newman and Smith was used to explore 5years worth of data dealing with the Billboard top 100 list. The finds suggest that hip hop has varying degrees of authenticity, but typically authenticity on the higher end coincides with commercial reception as artists who are more authentic boost sales prospects for later works. This relationship is important to explore as it paints a picture for how authentic voices are able to be heard.

This paper interrogates the representation of women in theNEW YORK TIMES (nyt)coverage of the 2011 Egyptian uprising. In it, I highlight some of the ways in which Orientalist stereotypes were often manifested in thenytrepresentation of female protestors. The data for this project draws upon 224 news-stories published in thenytduring the 2011 Egyptian uprising. The stories offer a detailed coverage of the popular movement between January 25 and February 19, 2011. I carry out a textual analysis of news and commentaries, and read the text through the lens of feminist and postcolonial theories. My analysis suggests that traditional Orientalist motifs of passiveness coexisted along new ones of agency in the coverage. By evoking the myth of female passiveness and framing female activism as an exception, thenyt, I suggest, assuaged the effect of women's activism in deconstructing traditional gender and geopolitical stereotypes. In so doing, the paper contributes to exposing how Orientalist discourses are able to reflect variation and historical shifts. It also extends the postcolonial feminist insight to new cases by offering a critical reading of women's image in a key global news paper and amidst a period of change and uncertainties.

Activists have fashioned nonconventional forms of repertoire and contentious performances during the recent conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa. Salient among these contentious performances is virtual dissidence. I conceptualize virtual dissidence as a political performance in the repertoire of contention between authoritative regimes and the latter's contenders. The metaphors of repertoire and performance bridge apparent conceptual dichotomies in analyzing the role of social media in the Arab Spring such as structure versus agency in the service of a relational account of it. This essay will not bring these debates to any final resolution; rather, my goal is to provide a modest yet productive intervention in the debate over the importance of Internet activism in social movements. The significance of understanding virtual dissidence as emerging from repertoire is that it frames a meso-level explanation of collective action and political change. It accounts for the constraints imposed by the macro structure and the array of innovative responses ignited by activists' determination.

Over the last 5 years, a number of outbreaks of measles have occurred in several European Union (EU) countries. Many of these outbreaks continue and/or continued for more than 1 year after the notification of the first case. Curiously in many of measles outbreaks about 10% of the patients were less than 12 months of age. All these patients according to the current EU countries vaccination calendars were not yet vaccinated against measles. Based on the results of measles outbreaks, especially age of affected patients, we should consider changing measles vaccination schedules in all EU countries. Most of mothers between 30 and 40 years of age are not vaccinated against measles, and many of them are not naturally immune against measles. These mothers do not pose antibodies against measles and in turn do not provide vertical protection for their infants. In conclusion, administrating the first dose of measles vaccine in the EU countries should be considered before 12 months of age, most probably at 9 months of age.