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As U.S. Open attention begins, Althea Gibson’s 1950 breakthrough is a reminder that exclusion can survive without an explicitly discriminatory rule.

Forty years after a cloud of carbon dioxide suffocated communities around Cameroon’s Lake Nyos, the disaster remains a lesson in invisible risk, scientific humility, and who receives protection.

Sangwoo Cho argues that the Epstein-files controversy was more than a communications failure: it exposed the cost of cultivating distrust that cannot be contained.

After the Supreme Court reaffirmed birthright citizenship, Sangwoo Cho examines what the renewed fight reveals about who America allows to belong.

Dumplings do not tell one simple story of origin. Mariya Kirichok traces the mix of cultural exchange and independent invention behind filled-dough traditions around the world.

In Amsterdam, an uncertain search for salt becomes Shreya Dharavath’s case for moving through unfamiliar places with curiosity, humility, and room for connection.

Forty-nine years after Elvis Presley’s death, his image still reveals how celebrity, commerce and cultural memory reinforce one another.

India’s Independence Day honors liberation while keeping the unfinished work of pluralism and democracy in view.

Ninety-one years after the Social Security Act became law, its promise remains indispensable and financially vulnerable.

On Fidel Castro’s centenary, Cuba’s crisis exposes the distance between revolutionary memory and daily life.

From Spider-Man to MAGA, Sangwoo Cho examines why promises of restoration have become so persuasive across American culture and politics.

Inside Barcelona's Palau de la Música Catalana, architecture, patronage and Catalan identity meet beneath a stained-glass sun.

Mingei celebrated anonymous everyday craft. Its success in museums and markets forced the movement to confront the institutions it once questioned.

On the International Day of the World's Indigenous Peoples, the U.N. is focusing on midwives whose knowledge protects mothers, babies and community rights.

The August 12 total solar eclipse will cross the Arctic, Greenland, Iceland and Spain. Here is where to see it and how to watch safely.

Payrolls fell by 23,000 in July as unemployment held at 4.1 percent, while sharp downward revisions and subdued participation revealed weaker momentum.

Hiroshima Day arrives as the world's nuclear arsenals are being modernized, arms control is weakening, and thousands of warheads remain ready for use.

Solarpunk imagines a hopeful ecological future, but realizing it would require changes far beyond green architecture and individual consumption.

The decline of shared public life may be giving partisan identity more power to define how Americans see one another.

A delivery rider’s poetry joins a larger tradition of working-class writers turning labor, exhaustion, and survival into art.

The 250-year anniversary of the Declaration’s signing reveals how America turned a messy political sequence into one clean national myth.

A 49–50 vote left the war in the president’s hands, and exposed how far Congress has retreated from its own constitutional power.

Formula 1’s calendar is a business portfolio shaped by market strategy, public funding, heritage, and the scarcity of coveted grid slots.

A close reading of Alabama’s prison crisis, and why a real solution must be measured by accountability, care, safety, and the lives inside the system.

A disputed World Cup suspension became a test of how FIFA protects the appearance and reality of independence when political power seeks access.

After the Supreme Court rejected Trump’s emergency tariffs, the administration rebuilt them under a different law. The legal label changed; the constitutional fight did not.

More than 1,000 civilians were reportedly killed by drone attacks from January through May as strikes reached markets, schools, water systems and roads.

The decade’s biggest nostalgia trend is less about flower crowns and more about longing for a social internet that felt spontaneous, shared and human.

Daniel Ortega’s government is moving from controlling elections to eliminating them, revealing how authoritarian systems hollow out democracy before discarding it.

The Genesis Mission could accelerate medicine, energy, and discovery. Its success will depend on privacy, transparency, independent validation, and who gets access.

The Soviet Union promised equality among its republics, but repression, deportation, and Russification left political and cultural scars that still shape the region.

Two decades after Jon Stewart confronted Crossfire, political commentary has moved online, but its incentives still reward performance, outrage, and partisan theater.

India’s Cockroach Janta Party turned an insult against unemployed youth into a national movement demanding accountability for an examination system in crisis.

Over the past 10 years, the birth rate in the largest country in the world has dropped by 30%. Russian experts cite many factors, including the decline of traditional values, economic instability, and even extremists. Let’s examine how the government promotes childbirth and punishes those who choose to remain child-free, the factors that undermine these efforts, and the clear, effective measures the state could implement to support existing families and encourage people to have children....

We’ve come far as a country, from role-playing Hollywood-level combat scenarios in Atropia to embedding artificial intelligence in virtual warfare simulations. The U.S. military leaves no stone unturned in preparing its soldiers for the uncertainties of war. But if “closing the loop” is what makes the system better, who remains outside to evaluate it? Shield AI’s recent acquisition of Aechelon Technology paints a picture of a future where, as Shield AI CEO Gary Steele remarked in a statement,...

On June 29, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 that President Trump's firing of Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter without cause was lawful. In doing so, the Court overturned a 91-year-old precedent that had prevented presidents from removing members of independent agencies at will. The decision represents the most significant expansion of presidential power over the federal government in nearly a century. Independent agencies were designed by Congress to function as a check...

A Rare Moment of Agreement Democrats and Republicans rarely find common ground on social, economic, or political issues. However, one topic stands out: the need for a Congressional stock trading ban. Both parties overwhelmingly support this initiative. According to the Program for Public Consultation at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy, an impressive 86% of registered voters favor prohibiting members of Congress from trading stocks. This statistic comes with a margin of...

The last two weeks in the United States have seen nationwide protests against ICE, Donald Trump, and the actions of the DOJ within the last year. In those two weeks, students took to the streets in droves, participating in school walkouts, chanting, and claiming intersections and/or sidewalks in massive crowds. Although some in more organized manners than others, students have provided the bulk and blade of anti-ICE attention & action as of late. Local partisan groups have the choice to...

Look at the roster of the French national team. Then look at the history of French colonialism in West and North Africa. The connection between those two things is not coincidental. It is the entire story. France's ability to field one of the most competitive squads in the world in 2026 is inseparable from the migration patterns set in motion by its imperial history, the communities that formed in its cities as a result, and the young men who grew up in those communities dreaming of...

The Democratic Party has a Hakeem Jeffries problem. Not because Jeffries has done anything wrong, but because his position at the center of a fracturing coalition has made him the symbol of a debate that the party can no longer manage with careful language and calls for unity. Jeffries, if Democrats retake the House, would be the first Black speaker in history. Some members of his own party's insurgent wing are running against his allies and chanting at their victory parties that he is next....

After the annexation of Crimea in March of 2014, Ukraine entered a brief sphere of relevance in global politics. The spotlight garnered substantial support from Western allies – primarily NATO and EU member nations, among others. Once the sensationalism of the event faded and the priorities of others shifted over time, the attention on Russia’s aggression towards Ukraine gradually faded. On February 24, 2022, the world’s attention suddenly returned to the post-Soviet country when a formal...

The United States turns 250 years old this week. The NPR/PBS News/Marist poll released July 1, 2026 asked Americans how they feel about that milestone. The results do not describe a nation in the mood for celebration. They describe a nation that is exhausted, divided, and deeply uncertain about whether the system it inherited is capable of delivering on what it promised. The poll is worth sitting with. Not because any single survey can capture the full complexity of what 330 million people...

We are raised to not think outside ourselves, to ignore the unhoused person asking for food, to avert our eyes at the sight of struggling families desperate for medical care. The United States and similar capitalist Western cultures have cultivated a mindset of “not owing anyone anything” and of watching out for yourself above all else. This seems to remain true in closer-knit groups like family and friends as well as in larger community bodies. We have created a culture where support and...

Everything you see can now be yours with the click of a button: every new shirt scrolled past on Instagram, every new food trend on TikTok. Social media and online shopping have built an algorithm of wanting, and the fastest possible way to satisfy it. Online shopping platforms push products toward consumers with little acknowledgment of the environmental cost on either side of the transaction. As with most technological advances, the focus stays on human convenience, not on what those...

From the earliest traces of humanity, our existence has been accompanied by creation: sculptures, paintings on cave walls, music, and stories. Art has been found on every continent with early human inhabitants, across nearly every style and medium imaginable. Yet humanity is often defined by its more practical inventions, as the agriculturists and the toolmakers. What about the artists? Storytellers Even before the invention of written language, humans were storytellers. Cave paintings were...

The electoral college is one of the oldest and most distinctive features of American democracy. Outlined in Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, it began as a compromise between giving the public a direct voice in choosing the president and preserving congressional power. Here is how the system worked originally, and how it changed with the 12th Amendment in 1804 and the 23rd Amendment in 1961. How the System Works Allocation: Each state receives a number of electors equal to its two...

Months ago, the Department of Justice quietly removed a 2024 study from the National Institute of Justice's public site. The study examined the political affiliations of domestic terrorism perpetrators and found that 84.4 percent of ideologically motivated incidents of political violence between 1990 and 2020, 227 out of 269 events, were carried out by far-right actors. The data suggested that the far right, a key base of support for President Donald Trump and the broader MAGA movement, had...

Mullets, red hats, and American flag apparel have become shorthand for the American South in the popular imagination. Southern culture is too often portrayed as synonymous with cruelty and bigotry. Popular media tends to depict the region as impoverished and uneducated, classist stereotypes that go largely unchallenged because the South is also framed as cruel and therefore undeserving of the compassion typically extended to struggling communities. Southern Roots That image obscures a more...

Legacy admissions have become one of the most quietly debated features of American higher education. The conversation tends to flare up around Supreme Court decisions and admissions scandals, then fade. But the policy is still very much alive, and the students it displaces are real. The Where Legacy admissions exist in all states except California, Illinois, Maryland, Colorado, and Virginia. California and Maryland have enacted statewide bans covering both public and private universities,...

In an era of "uncs," "bums," and "goons," one term circulating among American teenagers stands out for its deeply political, and largely unknown, origin: "chud." The word began its life as the title of a 1984 horror film, "C.H.U.D.," an acronym for "Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers." From there, it was adopted by left-wing communities on 4chan as a derogatory label for right-wing individuals, before migrating into mainstream social media as a broader insult directed at anyone...