The strange spin of the nucleon

The recent series of experiments on polarized lepton-nucleon scattering have provided a strange new twist in the story of the nucleon, some of whose aspects are reviewed in these lectures. In the first lecture, we review some issues arising in the analysis of the data on polarized structure functions, focusing in particular on the importance and treatment of high-order QCD perturbation theory. In the second lecture some possible interpretations of the ``EMC spin effect" are reviewed, principally in the chiral soliton (Skyrmion) approach, but also interpretations related to the axial U(1) anomaly. This lecture also discusses other indications from recent LEAR data for an \bar{s} s component in the nucleon wave function, and discusses test of a model for this component. Finally, the third lecture reviews the implications of polarized structure functions measurements for experiments to search for cold dark matter particles, such as the lightest supersymmetric particle and the axion, after reviewing briefly the astrophysical and cosmological evidence for cold dark matter.