Generosity is valued in every culture, as well it should be. Still, generosity alone won’t create the society that we strive for. That’s the argument that nationally syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. makes in this November 2021 essay from Boulder, Colorado’s Daily Camera.
Continue reading “True Compassion Is More Than Flinging a Coin to a Beggar”
So cute! And what could possibly be more important to a girl (or woman) than cuteness? Well, there are a few things. Self-protection, for example, as long as it’s, y’know, done cutely. 🧡 In this November 2021 cartoon from The Nib, cartoonist and illustrator Gemma Correll lists “ten cute things that all girls do.” Adorbs!
Continue reading “Just Girly Things”
What do you remember learning in school about the history of your town or state? Did it give you a sense of pride? Now that you’re older and wiser, have you discovered anything that was left out (but probably shouldn’t have been)? In this July 2021 essay in Bitter Southerner, freelance writer and Texas native Sarah Enelow-Snyder writes about her exciting seventh grade field trip to the Alamo in San Antonio along with her critique of the ways that history is (and isn’t) taught in school.
Continue reading “How We Tell Stories in Texas”
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.”
Racism and agriculture—are they related? Do squirrels climb trees? Using historical background, current statistics and trends, and descriptions of Black farmers and organizations, Tom Philpott presents a detailed report of a complicated situation. Philpott is an award-winning journalist and Mother Jones food and agriculture correspondent; his report is from the May+June 2021 edition of the magazine.
Continue reading “After a Century of Dispossession, Black Farmers Are Fighting to Get Back to the Land”
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