Category: Argument

What I Learned as a Liberal Faculty Adviser for a Turning Point USA Chapter

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Image credit: Ricardo Tomás | The New York Times

Imagine being asked to work with an organization whose goals you strongly oppose. That’s what happened to Nicholas Creel, a professor of business law at Georgia College & State University, when a student asked him to be the adviser for their college’s chapter of Turning Point USA. It was not something he would have thought to do, but his “dedication to the principles of free speech” led him to see it as a request he could not turn down. So, he said yes, “despite disagreeing with virtually every position the organization holds.” Read on to find out how it all turned out, in a 2025 piece he wrote for the New York Times. You may be surprised.  

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A.I. Is Homogenizing Our Thoughts

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Illustration credit: Ariel Davis | The New Yorker

“A vacuous and dangerous echo chamber.” “Best creative booster ever!”  “An existential threat to humanity.” Whether you love it or hate it—or fall somewhere in between—it’s likely that you have used generative AI yourself. But is it a good idea to be doing so? And what will be the consequences of that use? In this June 2025 piece from The New Yorker, staff writer Kyle Chayka, who covers technology and internet culture, reports on recent studies that offer potential answers to these questions! 

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AI, Ain’t I A Woman?

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Image credit: Joy Buolamwini

Can artificial intelligence technology guess the gender of Oprah, Serena, Michelle, and other iconic women? That’s the question Canadian computer scientist and founder of the Algorithmic Justice League Joy Buolamwini poses in this three-and-a-half minute YouTube video.  Before you watch the video, what do you think the answer will be, especially given that the three women Buolamwini mentions are so well known that she can omit their last names? Now click “play.” 

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How Country Music Turned the Ford F-150 Into a Luxury Ride

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Image credit: Texas Monthly | Courtesy of Ford

Once upon a time, pickup trucks were strictly utility vehicles, used primarily for picking up and hauling stuff. Not so anymore, says Rose McMackin, a Texas writer whose work focuses on the American West. Nowadays, she says, pickup trucks are “aspirational,” used to project how the drivers want to be seen. So how on earth did that happen? According to McMackin, it’s a change that’s been largely fueled by country music. Read all about it (and listen to it) in an article she wrote for Texas Monthly  in August 2025. 

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A Guerilla Gardener in South Central LA

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Image credit: TED

How would you feel if you had no way of getting healthy food? Not good, right? That was the situation in South Central Los Angeles, one that Ron Finley set out to correct. He started by planting a vegetable garden on a strip of land between his house and the street. His 2013 TED Talk describes what happened after that.

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A Cartoon: You Guys….

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Image credit: Roz Chast, Instagram

Hey, you guys! Is this an expression you might use to address more than one person? If so, see what cartoonist Roz Chast has to say about that in this cartoon posted on Instagram in November, 2024. Chast is an award-winning cartoonist who is also a fellow of the American Philosophical Society. A philosophical cartoonist? A cartoonist philosopher? You decide!

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Love It or Lose It: The Cycle

Photo of a brightly colored bird with a long beak perched on a branch. Superimposed on the image in large lower case letters are the words “love it or lose it”; beneath the words is the logo of the World Wildlife Fund, and below that, the URL wwf.org/love.
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Birds are terrific, aren’t they? We like them. Some people even hang bird feeders in order to be able to see and hear birds more often. But then maybe those same people might unthinkingly kill the insects that the birds enjoy eating. Oops. In this short 2021 video, the World Wildlife Fund shows how all of nature is interconnected and comes around full circle to make one continuous chain of life.

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Why So Many Baseball Players Are Dominican

Nine Dominican youth league players, in uniform, sitting in their dugout.
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If you pay any attention to major league baseball (or even if you don’t), you’ve probably noticed that a disproportionately large number of star players are from the Dominican Republic, the Caribbean nation that shares its island with Haiti. Is that a coincidence? Are Dominicans just naturally and inexplicably gifted at the game of baseball? Well, no and (probably) no. The explanation involves much more than just sports; to get the full story, a Vox investigative team dug into two centuries of history and economics that involve, among other things, the Atlantic slave trade, the Cuban revolution, the business of baseball, and sugar. This video report was published in July 2023.

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