All Else

Imagine a world in which a hurricane devastates the Gulf Coast, and the U.S. has no federal agency prepared to quickly send supplies, financial aid and temporary housing assistance. Could the states manage this catastrophic event on their own?

For months readers have been learning about the enormity of Andrea Skinner’s suffering, following sexual abuse by her stepfather, and her mother Alice Munro’s decision to stay with and protect him. As scholars re-read Munro with a knowledge of the secrets she kept and the pain she caused, we have an opportunity — if not an obligation — to use our re-readings to reckon with sexual abuse of children and the silence that so often surrounds it.

A true advertising face-plant is a commercial that’s both tone-deaf and completely forgettable – so dull, off-putting or confusing that when a brand completely switches up its strategy, you almost don’t remember the massive blunder that compelled it to change course in the first place. Almost. Here are five of the biggest Super Bowl advertising flops.

A growing number of students in public schools – right now, about 15% of them – are eligible for special education services. But going into the current school year, more than half of U.S. public schools anticipate being short-staffed in special education.

The idea that autism is caused by vaccines has recently been revived by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the presumptive nominee for US Secretary of Health and Human Services, as well as by president-elect Donald Trump. There is strong data from different countries showing that these vaccines do not cause autism or underlie the vast increase in autism diagnosis rates. So why do suspicions that vaccines cause autism remain?

Hollywood has long resorted to this posh-but-unspecific English accent when telling stories set in European spaces where English isn’t the native language. This imperial accent appears in countless major productions. Where does this false British accent come from?

Using hateful, polarizing language to gain a political advantage or make an argument against a group of people, like immigrants, is not unique to the U.S. The use of this language is associated with populist shifts in many parts of the world. In Italy, such language was accompanied by mob violence, mass evictions and demolition of informal camps set up in the streets.

Since the 1940s, positive sentiment toward capitalism has improved. In the 2020s, the average article with capitalism got a more balanced 37% negative and 34% positive sentiment score. While capitalism clearly isn’t loved in the press, it’s also not disparaged as much as it was just after World War II.

A vote in Germany’s national parliament (Bundestag) has led to fears that the firewall supposedly separating mainstream political parties and the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has been blown apart.

In the 1990s Disney began buying land in northern Virginia for a planned theme park called America. It would be centered on American history. It was a colossal failure. Questions over how Disney would tell the complex – often discriminatory – history of the nation spurred a group of historians, led by David McCullough, to lodge their concerns: How would Disney construct its narrative of the United States? And how would the park affect Manassas, one of the most important Civil War battle sites?