Barack Obama

"You can no longer talk about what black America thinks or feels," says Pulitzer Prize--winning columnist Eugene Robinson. His new book, Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America, describes how African-American communities are becoming increasingly disconnected from one another.

Vanity Fair's Todd Purdum followed President Obama and his advisers around for a day this summer. He says the modern-day presidency would be unrecognizable to previous chief executives -- "thanks to the enormous bureaucracy, congressional paralysis, systematic corruption and disintegrating media."

The number of hate groups in the United States continues to rise, says Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Potok discusses how the rhetoric of hate groups has increasingly entered the mainstream in the wake of the nation's changing demographics and the election of President Obama.