In early April, a committee of ten professors submitted a “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences” to the chancellors of Vanderbilt University and ...

Dave Zirin on writing the life of Howard Zinn–and why his legacy points the way forward at the country’s semiquincentennial.

Though true and important, the warning has hardened into the familiarity of a cliché. Stock examples of so-called spurious correlations are now a dime a dozen. As one example goes, a Pacific island ...

At the time, the event that took place in Boston on the night of December 16, 1773 was not called the “Tea Party.” For more than 50 years, if it was mentioned at all in print, it was usually as “the ...

Editors’ Note: On December 17, 2020, the New England Journal of Medicine published a research letter, “Racial Bias in Pulse Oximetry Measurement,” prompted by this essay. Read the medical study here ...

Cedric Robinson was fond of quoting his friend and colleague Otis Madison: “The purpose of racism is to control the behavior of white people, not Black people. For Blacks, guns and tanks are ...

“Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” Alabama governor George Wallace’s most famous sentence fired through the frigid air on the coldest day anyone in the state could remember.

In their new book, Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue that American liberals have ironically succumbed to a conservative worldview, in the original sense of “conservative.” Instead of ...

U.S. history is a strange, exceptional field of play where, to paraphrase Garrison Keillor’s famous sign-off from Lake Wobegon, all the revolutions are strong, all the revolutionaries are kind, and ...

When James Baldwin visited San Francisco in 1963 to film a documentary about U.S. racism, he encountered neighborhoods in turmoil: the city was seizing properties through eminent domain, razing them, ...

COVID-19 has exposed the fragility and inequity of the U.S. system of higher education. Decades of state disinvestment coupled with the rise of corporate management techniques has led to skyrocketing ...

Over the past fifteen years of observing tech development, I’ve found that terms I once used like “cyber-utopianism,” “Internet-centrism,” and “techno-solutionism” fail to fully capture Big Tech’s ...