It’s not often that we encounter good news about wildfires, but here is a report that comes close. This July 2021 Associated Press report presented by NPR recounts some of the moderate successes in wildfire mitigation efforts that scientists have been able to observe with the Bootleg Fire in Oregon.
Continue reading “The Bootleg Fire, the Nation’s Biggest, Gives Scientists an Unexpected Experiment”
The US has a woman vice president, and there are now women referees on NBA courts and in the broadcast booths. Have women fully broken the glass ceiling? Not quite. In this June 2021 Sports Illustrated report, sports journalist Michael Rosen addresses the “grass ceiling” encountered by women baseball players, specifically, women on collegiate baseball teams.
Continue reading “Breaking the Grass Ceiling: More Women Are Playing College Baseball Than Ever Before”
Articles and editorials about Amazon, its warehouses and fulfillment centers, and its working conditions appear in probably hundreds, if not thousands, of newspapers and magazines every month. Local and regional newspapers cover the company, of course, as do general interest magazines, and you wouldn’t be surprised to find that business periodicals have a lot to say. Would you expect to find an essay about the company in a periodical that focuses exclusively on issues of higher education? Well, here’s one: Dartmouth University administrator and sociologist Joshua Kim poses some questions about Amazon in this June 2021 Inside Higher Education essay. (His essay mentions and links to a New York Times article, and we suggest that you take a look at that piece, too.)
Continue reading “Amazon’s Warehouses, Bezos’s Worldview, and Elite Higher Education”
If you pay any attention to economic news, you’re aware that the US stock market is flourishing, profits are high and rising for a large number of US businesses, worker productivity has increased tremendously, and worker wages are…stagnant. Or worse. Depending on how worker income is measured in relation to cost of living, the buying power of worker incomes has fallen substantially over several decades. There is no silver bullet, no magic fix, but there are many possibilities for remedying the situation. LaGuardia Community College student Qing Zhang is proposing in this essay that profit sharing could go a long way towards helping workers and the economy at the same time.
Continue reading “A Profit-Sharing Proposal”
The Chicago suburb of Evanston, Illinois, has received a lot of national attention for initiating a plan that they’re calling “reparations.” The plan acknowledges and takes steps toward redressing the town’s complicity in a long history of housing practices that have knowingly and intentionally discriminated against Black people, who currently comprise 16% of the town population, according to census data. Arts consultant A. Kirsten Mullen and economist William A. Darity Jr., authors of the 2020 award-winning book From Here to Equality, wrote this March 2021 essay on Evanston’s plan for the Washington Post.
Continue reading “Evanston, Illinois, Approved Reparations. Except It Isn’t Reparations.”
We already know all about how the world around us changed in 2020, how we had to modify, adjust, and adapt along with it. We’ve read and discussed all the effects, all the angles; we know all about it. One major aspect of life, though, may have gone unexamined: language habits. Journalist and culture critic Tracy Moore is surprised to notice a change in her own speech, and she relates her experience with it in this March 2021 Washington Post essay.
Continue reading “How Covid-19 Gave Me Back My Southern Accent”
Michael Jordan is a former superstar basketball player who dominated the NBA for more than a decade until his final retirement in 2003, but you probably already know that, even if you’re not a fan. You likely also know that Kobe Bryant was a superstar basketball player for the Los Angeles Lakers who died at age 42 in a helicopter crash. Here is an excerpt from Jordan’s eulogy at a memorial service for Bryant held at the Staples Center, the Lakers’ home arena, on February 24, 2020.
Continue reading “Eulogy for Kobe Bryant (excerpt)”
Have you ever made an ironic remark and had it misinterpreted or misunderstood? Us, too. It happens. In a real-time conversation, you might be able to explain and repair the conversation. Indeed, when the context and intention are clear enough, many potential misunderstandings don’t happen in the first place. On social media, though, things can get more complicated, and ironic intent may not be recognized. New York Times technology correspondent Mike Isaac wrote this March 2021 report on Facebook’s ironic irony problem.
Continue reading “For Political Cartoonists, the Irony Was That Facebook Didn’t Recognize Irony”
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