The Conversation

Black women in the U.S. have a history of struggle against violence and oppression. And too often when they experience joy, and show it, ridicule follows. They are said to be too loud, too emotional – well, too “Black women.” History shows that this is a familiar dog whistle.

Many parents are worried about their children using social media. But these concerns tend to focus on privacy, exposure to explicit material or contact with strangers. But looking at sexism and misogyny in schools and the influence of social media, it is also important for parents to understand how algorithms work. These can drive misogynistic content towards boys and young men and make extreme views seem normal.

These can drive misogynistic content towards boys and young men and make extreme views seem normal.

Professors across the country have sounded the alarm about infringements on academic freedom following crackdowns on pro-Palestine protesters on campus. The current conflict, however, is only the latest iteration of an intensifying decline in academic freedom.

According to the coevolutionary tale of humans and their lice, our immediate ancestors lost most of their body fur 3 to 4 million years ago and did not don clothing until 83,000 to 170,000 years ago. That means that for over 2.5 million years, early humans and their ancestors were simply naked.

Many observers say a controversial U.S. Supreme Court decision from July 1, 2024, turns presidents into kings – but they underestimate how truly radical the ruling actually may be. In fact, though the court’s majority said it was honoring constitutional tradition, it appears to have created something entirely new: a legal tyrant, someone above the law, a privilege even kings never enjoyed.

The village of Majdal Shams has been in mourning since July 27, 2024: the day a rocket hit a soccer field, killing 12 children and wounding tens more. Majdal Shams is home to a community whose relationship with Israel is doubly complicated: Druze residents of the Golan Heights, which Israel captured in 1967 and annexed in 1981.

Harris’ choice of Walz confirms and leans into an extraordinary vibe shift in American politics. In only a fortnight, the campaign has been flipped on its head. The fact that Harris did not pick Shapiro tells us a great deal about both how this campaign will be run, and the future of the Democratic Party more broadly. Walz’ elevation is indicative of a major shift in the party – one that Harris is leading.

A professor of business economics begs everyone, from investors to consumers to policymakers: Please calm down, take 10 deep breaths and relax. The economic data, taken together, paint a brighter if more complex picture.

The bomb, dropped by the US on August 6 1945, made orphans of around 2,000 children, mostly from central Hiroshima, who survived because they had been evacuated to the countryside. When they returned after Japan surrendered on August 15, they found their parents gone and their city razed to the ground.

The anxiety over the possibility that Presley’s Graceland might fall out of family control raises an important question: Why does Graceland matter? It’s the second-most-visited home in the U.S., topped only by the White House. According to the U.S. Interior Department. Many have viewed the singer’s life, output and legacy with a sneer. Nowhere is this condescension more evident than in patronizing references to his home.

Project 2025 lays out many standard conservative ideas – like prioritizing energy production over environmental and climate-change concerns, and rejecting the idea of abortion as health care – along with some much more extreme ones, like criminalizing pornography. And it proposes to eliminate or restructure countless government agencies in line with conservative ideology.

In the early years of the nation, the American flag rarely appeared except in government and military displays. That changed with the Civil War. As historian and author Marc Leepson writes in his book about the U.S. flag, Northerners began displaying it in homes and businesses to show support for the Union. After the war, the flag became a symbol of the reunified nation.

With the war in Gaza showing no sign of abating and the whole Middle East on a knife’s edge, the Israeli assassination of Hamas’s top political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, raises questions about whether it may spark a wider regional war.

J.D. Vance’s views on childless women are sharply at odds with the attitude of his present Catholic faith. Catholic history is full of childless women respected for their work, many of them members of religious communities. They often contributed to lasting social and cultural change. In fact, the very existence of women’s religious communities is a testament to the value Catholicism puts on childless women’s lives.

Inconsistency in appointments is one of the reasons why President Joe Biden’s call for Supreme Court reform, which Vice President Harris supports, should be considered a meaningful attempt to address a relatively new development that has diminished the ability of the people – through their elected representatives in the White House and the Senate – to shape an unelected Supreme Court.

Only 19% of Americans say the United States should abandon the principle of church-state separation. That said, criticism appears to be on the rise, particularly among political and religious conservatives. And such criticism comes from the top.

The 2024 Paris Olympics is drawing the eyes of the world as thousands of athletes and support personnel and hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the globe converge in France. It’s not just the eyes of the world that will be watching. Artificial intelligence systems will be watching, too.

Blaming the press for Joe Biden dropping out of his re-election bid assumes that the power of the press is significant and straightforward: If journalists report on an issue in a certain way for an extended period of time, they will ultimately shape how people feel about it. In reality, journalists’ influence is far more limited.

History usually happens at a leisurely pace, with major events months or even years apart. But this year, it seems like someone has pushed fast-forward, with significant events coming on a weekly or even daily basis. One company is now selling a T-shirt declaring “THIS IS MY LIVING IN UNPRECEDENTED TIMES SHIRT.”

The anti-Harris rhetoric is part of what a report by the Wilson Center, a nonpartisan think tank, described as a broad pattern of gendered and sexualized attacks on prominent women in public discourse.

A large clinical trial in South Africa and Uganda has shown that a twice-yearly injection of a new pre-exposure prophylaxis drug gives young women total protection from HIV infection. The trial tested whether the six-month injection of lenacapavir would provide better protection against HIV infection than two other drugs, both daily pills. All three medications are pre-exposure prophylaxis (or PrEP) drugs.

Did you know that casual drinks with friends or having a “wine mom” moment to unwind could actually be nudging up your risk for breast cancer? It sounds like a buzzkill. But it’s a truth that many might not know: Alcohol actually causes breast cancer.

For years, Democratic and Republican administrations in the US have touted the virtues of free trade to the rest of the world, working towards establishing a multilateral trading system that limits the use of protectionist policies. But it’s hypocritical.

Trump’s nostalgia is more than simple retrospection. Trump’s appeal isn’t just about a better economic past or a more stable society. It serves as an evocation of a time in America when women and minorities had less power.

Following the Dobbs v. Jackson Supreme Court decision, more than half of U.S. adolescents, ages 13-19, now live in a state with severely restricted or no legal abortion access. As a result, today’s young people are coming of age in what one expert in health law and bioethics has termed an “era of rights retractions.”

Veepstakes media coverage deserves its poor reputation as little more than an electoral parlor game. Too bad: Given the vice presidency’s importance and the media’s opportunity to educate Americans about who could be next to serve in the office, it should be so much more than that.

If Donald Trump would have suffered fatal injuries, the level of violence witnessed so far will be nothing in comparison to what would have happened in the next couple of months. It would have unleashed a new level of anger, frustration, resentment, hostility that we haven’t seen for many, many years in the U.S.

In more than 90% of U.S. public school districts, school board elections are nonpartisan and have been for centuries. But that long tradition may well be changing – and putting at risk the quality of the country’s education system by introducing divisive national political issues into the process by which a local community governs itself.

The raised fist is is full of meaning and has a long and varied history: It’s been used by fascists, socialists, communists, Black Power advocates and even golfer Tiger Woods. Will the world see that same gesture as Trump formally clinches the GOP nomination at the party’s Milwaukee convention? And if Trump does indeed raise a clenched fist at the convention, what will it mean?

The Romance Writers of America, once the world’s largest and most powerful authors’ association, filed for bankruptcy on May 30, 2024. In its filing, the nonprofit blamed “disputes concerning diversity, equity and inclusion” for its membership declining by a jaw-dropping 80%. It shows how quickly organizations can collapse if they don’t serve the needs of all their members. This debacle could serve as a warning to universities, companies and other groups now abolishing and scaling back inclusion efforts.

When Biden ran against Trump successfully in 2020, the selling point he made to those already concerned about his age was that he would be a bridge to the future, perhaps only serving one term. So why is Biden still clinging to power, even after broadcasting his frailty to the 50 million people who tuned in to the first debate?

Even before Douglass arrived in Ireland in 1845, he was aware of the rich tradition of Irish men and women involved in the transatlantic movement to bring an end to the U.S. system of enslavement. In particular, he was an admirer of the Irish nationalist leader Daniel O’Connell. A vocal critic of enslavement, O’Connell had played an important role in bringing it to an end in the British Empire in 1833.

The first 3D-printed firearm emerged in May 2013 with the release of the Liberator, a handgun created by Cody Wilson, a University of Texas law student and libertarian pro-firearms activist. Essentially a proof of concept, Wilson let the BBC film him firing the gun before releasing the open-source design for anyone to download.

France’s extreme-rightist National Rally was ahead after the first round, but alliances are likely to coalesce between the leftist, centrist and moderate right political parties to form a united front against far-right candidates in most electorates in the second round of voting. This would likely make it difficult for National Rally leader Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella to secure enough seats in the National Assembly to win an absolute majority after Sunday’s vote.

Federal Chevron deference is dead. On June 28, 2024, in a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court overturned the 40-year-old legal tenet that when a federal statute is silent or ambiguous about a particular regulatory issue, courts should defer to the implementing agency’s reasonable interpretation of the law.

Sovereign citizens have long been active in the U.S. and other countries. At the core of their beliefs is the denial of the government’s legitimacy. They commonly do not register their vehicles, acquire driver’s licenses or car insurance, or pay taxes. And they pose a significant threat to the public.

The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 against an estimated US$6 billion Purdue Pharma bankruptcy plan on June 27, 2024, that would have shielded the Sackler family – which owned and controlled the company – from legal liability. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have died from opioid-related overdoses since Purdue rolled out OxyContin in 1996. The company helped spur a public health crisis through its deceptive marketing and aggressive sales of OxyContin, a prescription opioid painkiller.

The indictments – and in some cases, the convictions – of hundreds of people charged with participating in the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, will have to be reconsidered, and possibly dropped, because of a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court on June 28, 2024. Among those charged using a broad interpretation of the obstruction law now narrowed by the high court: former President Donald Trump.

The earliest-ever general election debate featured a lot of bitter personal attacks. Joe Biden’s universally acknowledged poor performance surprised and even panicked Democrats; Donald Trump gave a more forceful – if not truthful – performance.

In what has been dubbed “one of the biggest shocks in cricket history”, the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup co-hosts USA beat Pakistan in a pulsating game on June 6. With seven runs needed off the last ball of a “super over” tiebreaker, Pakistan could only manage a single. Cricket is also hardly a mainstream sport in the US. Indeed, the New York Times suggested that many Americans were “oblivious to the magnitude” of the victory.

A peculiar desire seems to still haunt some white people: “I wish I knew what it was like to be Black.” This is a presumptive, racially imaginative desire, one that covets not just the rhythm of Black life, but also its blues. Canadian-American journalist Sam Forster is one of those white people.

After Editors of Columbia Law Review, a prominent journal run by students from the prestigious university’s law school, published an article critical of Israel, the board, which includes Columbia Law School faculty members and alumni, had the law review’s website taken down. The board soon relented and allowed the website back online on June 6, including the article in question. But it issued a statement accusing the student editors of failing to properly review the article prior to publication.