Cover: Signs of Life in the USA, 11th Edition by Sonia Maasik; Jack Solomon

Signs of Life in the USA

Eleventh Edition  ©2025 Sonia Maasik; Jack Solomon Formats: Achieve, E-book, Print

Authors

  • Headshot of Sonia Maasik

    Sonia Maasik

    Sonia Maasik, late of the UCLA Writing Programs, taught writing from developmental to advanced levels for over five decades. Along with Jack Solomon, she has co-authored the Bedford/St. Martin's textbooks Signs of Life in the U.S.A.: Readings on Popular Culture for Writers – now in its eleventh edition – and California Dreams and Realities.

  • Headshot of Jack Solomon

    Jack Solomon

    Jack Solomon is Professor Emeritus of English at California State University, Northridge, where he taught literature, critical theory, and popular cultural semiotics, and directed the Office of Academic Assessment and Program Review. He is often interviewed by the California media for analysis of current events and trends. He is the author of Discourse and Reference in the Nuclear Age (1988) and The Signs of Our Time (1990). Along with Sonia Maasik, he has co-authored the Bedford/St. Martin's textbooks Signs of Life in the U.S.A.: Readings on Popular Culture for Writers – now in its eleventh edition – and California Dreams and Realities.

  • Headshot of Bedford/St.Martin's

    Bedford/St.Martin's

    Established in 1981, Bedford/St. Martin’s is the largest college publisher of textbooks for English composition courses. They publish best-selling textbooks like A Writer’s Reference, The St. Martin’s Guide to College Writing, and Patterns for College Writing.

Table of Contents

Preface for Instructors 
Contents
INTRODUCTION

Popular Signs: Or, Everything You (Probably) Always Knew about American Culture (but Nobody Asked) 
  • The Rural Purge
  • From Folk to For-Profit
  • Pop Culture Goes To College
  • The Semiotic Method
  • Abduction and Overdetermination
  • Cultural Mythologies
  • Interpreting Popular Signs: or A Tale of Two Sitcoms
  • A House Divided: or “Duck Dynasty,” Meet “Euphoria”
  • The Classroom Connection
  • Your Turn
Writing about Popular Culture 
  • Using Active Reading Strategies
  • Prewriting Strategies
  • Developing Strong Arguments about Popular Culture
  • Conducting a Semiotic Analysis
  • Reading Visual Images Actively
  • Reading Essays about Popular Culture
   - Jeremy Creek: The Anglerfish in the Machine: Horror and Re-enchantment In Stranger Things [student essay]
   - Amy Lin: Barbie: Queen of Dolls and Consumerism [student essay]
   - Irina Bodea: Banks: Progressive or Conventional? [student essay] 

Conducting Research and Citing Sources  
  • Scott Jaschik: A Stand against Wikipedia
  • Patti S. Caravello: Judging Quality on the Web
  • Trip Gabriel: For Students in Internet Age, No Shame in Copy and Paste
  • Audrey Campbell, The best writing AI practices unveiled: Mastering AI for simple tasks
  • Synthesizing, Quoting, Paraphrasing, and Citing Sources
  • In-Text Citations
  • List of Works Cited

Chapter 1
American Paradox: Culture, Conflict, and Contradiction in the U.S.A. 
  • A House Invaded
  • Six Ideological Conflicts Behind the Insurrection
  • A City on a Hill
  • The Summer of Love
  • The Puritan Paradox
  • The 1 Percent
  • The Statue of Liberty vs. the Wall
  • The End of the "Post-Racial" Society
  • What's Red and Blue and Mad All Over?
The Readings
  • Mark Murphy: The Uncivil War: How Cultural Sorting of America Divides Us
  • Dan Rather and Elliot Kirscher: The MAGA Party
  • Rhodes Cook, The “Big Sort” Continues, with Trump as a Driving Force
  • Urban Institute: Debunking Three Myths about Rural America
  • Michelle Goldberg: The Radicalization of the Young Right
  • Michael Feola: Moms for Liberty is part of a long history of rightwing mothers’ activism in the US
  • Rakesh Kochar and Stella Sechopoulos: How the American middle class has changed in the past five decades
  • Constance Grady: Why so much Obama-era pop culture feels so cringe now
  • George Parker: Celebrating Inequality
  • Barbara Ehrenreich: Bright-Sided 

Chapter 2
An Irrepressible Conflict: Identity and Ideology in the New Millennium
  • The Tuvel Affair
  • Who Are You? The Personal is the Political Part 1: Sex and Gender
  • The Personal is the Political Part 2: Race
  • Intersections
  • The Big Sort
The Readings
  • Michael Omi: In Living Color: Race and American Culture
  • Jens Manuel Krogstad and Kiana Cox: For Black History Month, a look at what Black Americans say is needed to overcome racial inequality
  • Rachelle Hampton: Which People?
  • Zahir Janmohamed: Your Cultural Attire
  • Aaron Devor: Gender Role Behaviors and Attitudes
  • Deborah Blum: The Gender Blur: Where Does Biology End and Society Take Over?
  • Ellie Muir: A Timeline of JK Rowling’s comments about women and transgender rights
  • Michael Hulshof-Schmidt: What’s in an Acronym? Parsing the LGBTQQIP2SAA Community
  • Hanna Flint: How Tainted Is Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 25 Years On?
  • Alfred Lubrano: The Shock of Education: How College Corrupts 

Chapter 3
The Digital Divide: Social Media, Politics, and the Marketing of America
  • The Company Formerly Known as Twitter
  • Whose Space?
  • For Whom the Bell Tolls
  • The New Panopticon
  • Where Have All the Adverts Gone?
  • Big Sister
  • AI, or It's the End of the World as We Know It
  • Back to the Future
The Readings
  • Chandra Steele: Under Elon, Twitter's Political Divide Deepens Markedly 
  • Fonda Lee: Twitter Is the Worst Reader
  • John Herrman: Inside Facebook’s (Totally Insane, Unintentionally Gigantic, Hyperpartisan) Political-Media Machine
  • Brooke Gladstone: Influencing Machines: The Echo Chambers of the Internet
  • Jacob Silverman: “Pics or It Didn’t Happen”: The Mantra of the Instagram Era
  • Kaitlyn Tiffany: No One Knows Exactly What Social Media Is Doing to Teens
  • Rebecca Jennings: Stop Canceling Normal People Who Go Viral
  • Elijah Clark: The Ethical Dilemma of AI in Marketing: A Slippery Slope
  • Judy Estrin: I Helped Create the Internet, and I’m Worried About What It’s Doing to Young People
  • Derek Thompson: The Four-Letter Code to Selling Just About Anything

Chapter 4
Consuming Passions: The Culture of American Consumption 
  • It's Not Your Grandfather's Automobile
  • The Tesla Challenge
  • #leggingsdaynd
  • The Handmaid’s Tale
  • Jeans, Spandex, Leotards, and Leg Warmers
  • Life in a Consumer Culture
  • Disposable Decades
  • The Pandemic
The Readings
  • James A. Roberts: The Treadmill of Consumption
  • Naily Ordabayeva: How Liberals and Conservatives Shop Differently
  • Avery Koop: Ranked: Gen Z’s Favorite Brands, Compared with Older Generations
  • Jordyn Holman: Millennials Tried to Kill the American Mall, But Gen Z Might Save It
  • Emily Stewart: The Bud Light boycott, explained as much as is possible 
  • Forrester: Three Consumer Behaviors That Emerged During the Pandemic Are Persisting
  • Chris Arning: What Can Semiotics Contribute to Packaging Design? 

Chapter 5
The Streaming of America: How TV Divides Us
  • Yellowstone
  • Something for Everyone
  • From Mary Tyler Moore to The Handmaid’s Tale
  • Litchfield Is the New Mayberry
  • Writing about Television
  • From Symbols to Icons
  • And Now a Word from Our Sponsors
  • Reality Bites  
The Readings
  • Caryn James: 1923 and the Violent TV Universe That Has Electrified the US
  • Samuel Getachew: The Problem with Euphoria 
  • Kathryn VanAredonk: TV’s White Guys Are in Crisis 
  • Oihab Allal-Chérif: Black Mirror: The Dark Side of Technology
  • Claire Miye Stanford: You’ve Got the Wrong Song: Nashville and Country Music Feminism
  • Neal Gabler: The Social Networks
  • Massimo Pigliucci: The One Paradigm to Rule Them All: Scientism and The Big Bang Theory
  • Brittany Levine Beckman: Why We Binge-Watch Stuff We Hate

Chapter 6
The Hollywood Sign: The Culture of American Film
  • The Pandora Perplex
  • The Culture Industry
  • Interpreting the Signs of American Film
  • Repetition with a Difference
  • Movies as Metaphors 
The Readings
  • Adam Scovell: How masterly horror Deliverance set a controversial trend
  • Robert B. Ray: The Thematic Paradigm 
  • Linda Seger: Creating the Myth
  • Nicholas Barber, The Little Mermaid: Why are films becoming so badly-lit and difficult to see?
  • Brandon Ambrosino, Sound of Freedom: Is the child trafficking drama a watershed moment for 'faith-based' filmmaking?
  • Maya Phillips: The Narrative Experiment That is the Marvel Cinematic Universe
  • Mikhail Lyubansky: The Racial Politics of Black Panther
  • Michael Parenti: Class and Virtue 

Chapter 7
Tangled Roots: The Cultural Politics of Popular Music
  • Country Comes Out Swinging
  • It’s Been a Long Time Coming
  • The Turning Point
  • Country Road
  • The Ties That Don’t Bind
  • Coda: The Ascent of the Diva  
The Readings
  • Nolan Gasser: Music Is Supposed to Unify Us. Is the Streaming Revolution Fragmenting Us Instead?
  • Brendan Morrow: Jason Aldean's “Try That in a Small Town” controversy, explained
  • Conor Friedersdorf: Why Is Tracy Chapman at the Center of a Country-Music Controversy?
  • Kenan Malik: The protest song that’s taken America by storm hits too many false notes
  • Jon Meachan and Tim McGraw: How Country Music Explains America’s Divided History
  • Karis Rivers, Hip-Hop’s Evolution: From Political Empowerment to Commercial Beast
  • Nadra Nittle: Lil Nas X Isn’t an Anomaly
  • Eileen O'Grady: Visions of power in Barbie, Beyoncé, Swift
  • Christina Newland: A Cultural History of the Diva
  • Dani Deahl: Monsta X and Steve Aoki: How K-pop Took Over YouTube

Product Updates

New readings on today’s leading issues. Signs of Life in the USA helps promote lively teaching and high student interest—as well as strong student writing—by keeping up with the fast pace of popular culture, with new selections on the most current topics. 

A new chapter on technology. This new chapter, “The Digital Divide: Social Media, Politics, and the Marketing of America,” explores the power of technologies like AI and social media by focusing on three areas in which they have already had an indelible impact on American life: politics, advertising, and the ways in which we interact with each other. 
 
Vibrant art throughout the book. Much of the art in the eleventh edition is new, including full-color images in the e-book, offering a visual perspective designed to enhance the critical understanding modeled by the text.  

A new streamlined organization. In response to instructor feedback, the eleventh edition has been streamlined to seven thematic chapters preceded by an introductory chapter explaining and contextualizing the book’s unique semiotic approach.

Authors

  • Headshot of Sonia Maasik

    Sonia Maasik

    Sonia Maasik, late of the UCLA Writing Programs, taught writing from developmental to advanced levels for over five decades. Along with Jack Solomon, she has co-authored the Bedford/St. Martin's textbooks Signs of Life in the U.S.A.: Readings on Popular Culture for Writers – now in its eleventh edition – and California Dreams and Realities.

  • Headshot of Jack Solomon

    Jack Solomon

    Jack Solomon is Professor Emeritus of English at California State University, Northridge, where he taught literature, critical theory, and popular cultural semiotics, and directed the Office of Academic Assessment and Program Review. He is often interviewed by the California media for analysis of current events and trends. He is the author of Discourse and Reference in the Nuclear Age (1988) and The Signs of Our Time (1990). Along with Sonia Maasik, he has co-authored the Bedford/St. Martin's textbooks Signs of Life in the U.S.A.: Readings on Popular Culture for Writers – now in its eleventh edition – and California Dreams and Realities.

  • Headshot of Bedford/St.Martin's

    Bedford/St.Martin's

    Established in 1981, Bedford/St. Martin’s is the largest college publisher of textbooks for English composition courses. They publish best-selling textbooks like A Writer’s Reference, The St. Martin’s Guide to College Writing, and Patterns for College Writing.

Table of Contents

Preface for Instructors 
Contents
INTRODUCTION

Popular Signs: Or, Everything You (Probably) Always Knew about American Culture (but Nobody Asked) 
  • The Rural Purge
  • From Folk to For-Profit
  • Pop Culture Goes To College
  • The Semiotic Method
  • Abduction and Overdetermination
  • Cultural Mythologies
  • Interpreting Popular Signs: or A Tale of Two Sitcoms
  • A House Divided: or “Duck Dynasty,” Meet “Euphoria”
  • The Classroom Connection
  • Your Turn
Writing about Popular Culture 
  • Using Active Reading Strategies
  • Prewriting Strategies
  • Developing Strong Arguments about Popular Culture
  • Conducting a Semiotic Analysis
  • Reading Visual Images Actively
  • Reading Essays about Popular Culture
   - Jeremy Creek: The Anglerfish in the Machine: Horror and Re-enchantment In Stranger Things [student essay]
   - Amy Lin: Barbie: Queen of Dolls and Consumerism [student essay]
   - Irina Bodea: Banks: Progressive or Conventional? [student essay] 

Conducting Research and Citing Sources  
  • Scott Jaschik: A Stand against Wikipedia
  • Patti S. Caravello: Judging Quality on the Web
  • Trip Gabriel: For Students in Internet Age, No Shame in Copy and Paste
  • Audrey Campbell, The best writing AI practices unveiled: Mastering AI for simple tasks
  • Synthesizing, Quoting, Paraphrasing, and Citing Sources
  • In-Text Citations
  • List of Works Cited

Chapter 1
American Paradox: Culture, Conflict, and Contradiction in the U.S.A. 
  • A House Invaded
  • Six Ideological Conflicts Behind the Insurrection
  • A City on a Hill
  • The Summer of Love
  • The Puritan Paradox
  • The 1 Percent
  • The Statue of Liberty vs. the Wall
  • The End of the "Post-Racial" Society
  • What's Red and Blue and Mad All Over?
The Readings
  • Mark Murphy: The Uncivil War: How Cultural Sorting of America Divides Us
  • Dan Rather and Elliot Kirscher: The MAGA Party
  • Rhodes Cook, The “Big Sort” Continues, with Trump as a Driving Force
  • Urban Institute: Debunking Three Myths about Rural America
  • Michelle Goldberg: The Radicalization of the Young Right
  • Michael Feola: Moms for Liberty is part of a long history of rightwing mothers’ activism in the US
  • Rakesh Kochar and Stella Sechopoulos: How the American middle class has changed in the past five decades
  • Constance Grady: Why so much Obama-era pop culture feels so cringe now
  • George Parker: Celebrating Inequality
  • Barbara Ehrenreich: Bright-Sided 

Chapter 2
An Irrepressible Conflict: Identity and Ideology in the New Millennium
  • The Tuvel Affair
  • Who Are You? The Personal is the Political Part 1: Sex and Gender
  • The Personal is the Political Part 2: Race
  • Intersections
  • The Big Sort
The Readings
  • Michael Omi: In Living Color: Race and American Culture
  • Jens Manuel Krogstad and Kiana Cox: For Black History Month, a look at what Black Americans say is needed to overcome racial inequality
  • Rachelle Hampton: Which People?
  • Zahir Janmohamed: Your Cultural Attire
  • Aaron Devor: Gender Role Behaviors and Attitudes
  • Deborah Blum: The Gender Blur: Where Does Biology End and Society Take Over?
  • Ellie Muir: A Timeline of JK Rowling’s comments about women and transgender rights
  • Michael Hulshof-Schmidt: What’s in an Acronym? Parsing the LGBTQQIP2SAA Community
  • Hanna Flint: How Tainted Is Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 25 Years On?
  • Alfred Lubrano: The Shock of Education: How College Corrupts 

Chapter 3
The Digital Divide: Social Media, Politics, and the Marketing of America
  • The Company Formerly Known as Twitter
  • Whose Space?
  • For Whom the Bell Tolls
  • The New Panopticon
  • Where Have All the Adverts Gone?
  • Big Sister
  • AI, or It's the End of the World as We Know It
  • Back to the Future
The Readings
  • Chandra Steele: Under Elon, Twitter's Political Divide Deepens Markedly 
  • Fonda Lee: Twitter Is the Worst Reader
  • John Herrman: Inside Facebook’s (Totally Insane, Unintentionally Gigantic, Hyperpartisan) Political-Media Machine
  • Brooke Gladstone: Influencing Machines: The Echo Chambers of the Internet
  • Jacob Silverman: “Pics or It Didn’t Happen”: The Mantra of the Instagram Era
  • Kaitlyn Tiffany: No One Knows Exactly What Social Media Is Doing to Teens
  • Rebecca Jennings: Stop Canceling Normal People Who Go Viral
  • Elijah Clark: The Ethical Dilemma of AI in Marketing: A Slippery Slope
  • Judy Estrin: I Helped Create the Internet, and I’m Worried About What It’s Doing to Young People
  • Derek Thompson: The Four-Letter Code to Selling Just About Anything

Chapter 4
Consuming Passions: The Culture of American Consumption 
  • It's Not Your Grandfather's Automobile
  • The Tesla Challenge
  • #leggingsdaynd
  • The Handmaid’s Tale
  • Jeans, Spandex, Leotards, and Leg Warmers
  • Life in a Consumer Culture
  • Disposable Decades
  • The Pandemic
The Readings
  • James A. Roberts: The Treadmill of Consumption
  • Naily Ordabayeva: How Liberals and Conservatives Shop Differently
  • Avery Koop: Ranked: Gen Z’s Favorite Brands, Compared with Older Generations
  • Jordyn Holman: Millennials Tried to Kill the American Mall, But Gen Z Might Save It
  • Emily Stewart: The Bud Light boycott, explained as much as is possible 
  • Forrester: Three Consumer Behaviors That Emerged During the Pandemic Are Persisting
  • Chris Arning: What Can Semiotics Contribute to Packaging Design? 

Chapter 5
The Streaming of America: How TV Divides Us
  • Yellowstone
  • Something for Everyone
  • From Mary Tyler Moore to The Handmaid’s Tale
  • Litchfield Is the New Mayberry
  • Writing about Television
  • From Symbols to Icons
  • And Now a Word from Our Sponsors
  • Reality Bites  
The Readings
  • Caryn James: 1923 and the Violent TV Universe That Has Electrified the US
  • Samuel Getachew: The Problem with Euphoria 
  • Kathryn VanAredonk: TV’s White Guys Are in Crisis 
  • Oihab Allal-Chérif: Black Mirror: The Dark Side of Technology
  • Claire Miye Stanford: You’ve Got the Wrong Song: Nashville and Country Music Feminism
  • Neal Gabler: The Social Networks
  • Massimo Pigliucci: The One Paradigm to Rule Them All: Scientism and The Big Bang Theory
  • Brittany Levine Beckman: Why We Binge-Watch Stuff We Hate

Chapter 6
The Hollywood Sign: The Culture of American Film
  • The Pandora Perplex
  • The Culture Industry
  • Interpreting the Signs of American Film
  • Repetition with a Difference
  • Movies as Metaphors 
The Readings
  • Adam Scovell: How masterly horror Deliverance set a controversial trend
  • Robert B. Ray: The Thematic Paradigm 
  • Linda Seger: Creating the Myth
  • Nicholas Barber, The Little Mermaid: Why are films becoming so badly-lit and difficult to see?
  • Brandon Ambrosino, Sound of Freedom: Is the child trafficking drama a watershed moment for 'faith-based' filmmaking?
  • Maya Phillips: The Narrative Experiment That is the Marvel Cinematic Universe
  • Mikhail Lyubansky: The Racial Politics of Black Panther
  • Michael Parenti: Class and Virtue 

Chapter 7
Tangled Roots: The Cultural Politics of Popular Music
  • Country Comes Out Swinging
  • It’s Been a Long Time Coming
  • The Turning Point
  • Country Road
  • The Ties That Don’t Bind
  • Coda: The Ascent of the Diva  
The Readings
  • Nolan Gasser: Music Is Supposed to Unify Us. Is the Streaming Revolution Fragmenting Us Instead?
  • Brendan Morrow: Jason Aldean's “Try That in a Small Town” controversy, explained
  • Conor Friedersdorf: Why Is Tracy Chapman at the Center of a Country-Music Controversy?
  • Kenan Malik: The protest song that’s taken America by storm hits too many false notes
  • Jon Meachan and Tim McGraw: How Country Music Explains America’s Divided History
  • Karis Rivers, Hip-Hop’s Evolution: From Political Empowerment to Commercial Beast
  • Nadra Nittle: Lil Nas X Isn’t an Anomaly
  • Eileen O'Grady: Visions of power in Barbie, Beyoncé, Swift
  • Christina Newland: A Cultural History of the Diva
  • Dani Deahl: Monsta X and Steve Aoki: How K-pop Took Over YouTube

Product Updates

New readings on today’s leading issues. Signs of Life in the USA helps promote lively teaching and high student interest—as well as strong student writing—by keeping up with the fast pace of popular culture, with new selections on the most current topics. 

A new chapter on technology. This new chapter, “The Digital Divide: Social Media, Politics, and the Marketing of America,” explores the power of technologies like AI and social media by focusing on three areas in which they have already had an indelible impact on American life: politics, advertising, and the ways in which we interact with each other. 
 
Vibrant art throughout the book. Much of the art in the eleventh edition is new, including full-color images in the e-book, offering a visual perspective designed to enhance the critical understanding modeled by the text.  

A new streamlined organization. In response to instructor feedback, the eleventh edition has been streamlined to seven thematic chapters preceded by an introductory chapter explaining and contextualizing the book’s unique semiotic approach.

The only popular culture reader with a critical edge

How does social media shape our current political climate? What are the ethical implications of using artificial intelligence in advertising? By presenting a variety of viewpoints from a diverse range of voices, Signs of Life in the USA gives students the tools to approach these and other important questions about the world they know. Through close examination of the movies, music, shows, memes, and trends that make up popular culture today, students will learn to think critically about the signs and symbols that surround them–becoming better writers in the process.

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