P e g g y Wesselink Potsdam College SUNY This article reports the results of a content analysis of sexual rhetoric in editorial photographs (N = 994) in 2001 issues of Maxim and Stuff magazines.Goffman's (1979) classifications of gender in advertisements were used to examine how this new generation of "'lad" magazines uses images to provide readers with cues about sexuality and sexual practice. The findings reveal that both magazines construct sexuality in similar ways. However, as expected, the overall message about sexuality in the photos is different for men than for women. Women are more likely than men to be portrayed as sex objects, such as the common practice of photographing them in contorting or demeaning positions. Both magazines also depict white people as sexier than other races and assume heterosexuality. Sexuality, sexual attractiveness, and sexual practice are often defined by the mass media. T h e m e d i a prescribe h o w we should look, with w h o m we should have sex, and how important sex should be in our lives. In popular magazines, these messages are c o m m unicated in a variety o f ways: through the stories told in the articles, through the photos, and through the advertisements. In the last 30 98

We examine the factors driving rural school consolidations, focusing our analysis on Nebraska. We consider statutory and case law, the school financing formulas that drive consolidation and the efforts by rural citizens to challenge those financing formulas in courts. We analyze how rural school consolidations have been framed in newspaper coverage, in order to see the dominant understandings of the cost-benefit tradeoffs in consolidating rural schools. Finally, we study three cases of rural Nebraska school districts for the insights these cases provide as to the challenges of sustaining rural community schools and the effects of consolidation on the students and the communities. Our conclusion is that schools play a vital role in sustaining rural community life, although the costs to the community when schools are consolidated are more difficult to quantify than the economies of scale that motivate those consolidations. Rural Schools: Benefits and Challenges Sustaining educational quality in rural America is a considerable challenge, and it is one worth addressing. Studies document that student performance in small schools compares favorably with student performance in larger, mainly urban and suburban, schools. As Lawrence and her colleagues summarized, the research on the value of small schools shows that small schools are safer, graduate higher percentages of students, have lower drop-out rates, send larger proportions of their graduates on to post-secondary education, have better attendance rates, provide students with a stronger sense of belonging, produce higher student grade point averages, and provide greater opportunities for participation in extra-curricular activities (Lawrence et al., 2002, pp. 8-9 1). In Nebraska particularly, a study placed the graduation rate for districts with less than 100

In December 2014, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report on CIA detention and interrogation practices from 2002–2009. Several survey organizations then released polls that appeared to show a majority of Americans supportive of the CIA program, prompting such news headlines as ‘Polls Show a Majority of Americans Support Torture’ and ‘Let’s Not Kid Ourselves: Most Americans are Fine with Torture’. The authors of this article were skeptical of these conclusions. They therefore conducted a survey experiment in which they explored whether slight variations in how this issue is framed – e.g. referencing the 9/11 terrorist attacks, linking the policy to the George W Bush administration, identifying the specific tactics used on detainees or emphasizing the broader consequences for American interests abroad – impact public support for torture. They found that respondents can be primed to express slim support or substantial opposition to the policy based on which of these considerations are called to mind.

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