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Despite being a time when people from all over the world come together in equality and peace, the Olympics are still uncertain territory for transgender athletes. There are no transgender athletes who are competing outside of the gender they were assigned at birth at this year’s Games. Transgender women who transitioned after puberty aren’t allowed […]

Technology is on its way to getting a little bit safer.  The US Senate on Tuesday passed a pair of bills — the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA 2.0) — designed to protect kids online. It’s shockingly bipartisan: The vote to approve the package of […]

Look around and you might see it: the telltale signs that the #Resistance has been born again. A-list celebs are rallying for and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris; Zoom calls of Black, Latino, female, and young voters are reaching capacity; the coconut-tree and brat memes keep coming. Even cringe and earnest #Resist merch is back […]

Nearly two months after launch and almost 50 days after they were initially supposed to return to Earth, two astronauts stuck at the International Space Station finally appear to be closer to their homeward voyage. That they were trapped by troubles with their Boeing Starliner spacecraft has only raised fresh doubts about the company’s technological and engineering […]

The conversation went off the rails within the first few minutes. Speaking Wednesday to three Black female reporters at the National Association of Black Journalists’ annual convention, former President Donald Trump was expected to make an appeal to Black voters, contrast his appearance with Vice President Kamala Harris’s absence from the event, and, of course, […]

Joyce Poole and Michael Pardo recently published a groundbreaking study on elephant communication: Using a machine learning model, they were able to show strong evidence that African savannah elephants have unique names for one another. The statistical model they used — known as a random forest model — is nothing new or snazzy. It’s been […]

Over the past few months, events in the Middle East have been giving the world a crash course in escalation management — or, more accurately, the failure to manage escalation.  Despite the ongoing carnage in Gaza, the region is not quite in the state of all-out war that many have feared since last October. But […]

Editors note: In July 2024, while speaking at the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) conference, former President Donald Trump questioned Vice President Kamala Harris’s racial identity, saying: “She was always of Indian heritage. She was only promoting Indian heritage, I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened […]

Kamala Harris has reportedly narrowed her list of potential running mates down to three: Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro. All these contenders have their upsides. Walz is a Midwestern veteran who plays a great no-nonsense, folksy dad on TV and repeatedly won a Republican-leaning, rural congressional district […]

On TikTok, thousands of women are panicking over a new kind of ailment. “I’m kind of scared to ask the internet this, but I need to know,” content creator @niessaxoxo_ said in a TikTok earlier this month. “Do I have blush blindness?”  To understand “blush blindness,” one has to understand  “eyebrow blindness,” a term coined […]

Call them a vibe shift, the coconutpilling of America, or the next stage of “brat summer,” but the burst of memes that accompanied the launch of Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign matter. They have not just breathed new humor and life into the Democratic Party’s hopes of beating former President Donald Trump, but have […]

Since his selection as former President Donald Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance has developed a reputation for being a bit strange.  News articles and social media alike are riddled with strange Vance comments: his belief that “childless cat ladies” are running America into the ground, his hostility to no-fault divorce, and his choice to […]

Abortion was always slated to be a top issue in the 2024 presidential election. But virtually no one predicted that politicians would be openly blasting those ambivalent about having children.  “We are effectively run in this country … by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices […]

On Monday, President Joe Biden announced three proposals to reform the Supreme Court: term limits for justices, a binding code of Supreme Court ethics, and a constitutional amendment overturning the Court’s decision allowing sitting presidents to violate the criminal law. Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential nominee, also endorsed the proposals. But […]

After years of turmoil, Venezuela held national elections on Sunday. Voters of various political affiliations hoped the contest would put an end to the political strife and economic difficulties that have gripped the country for a decade. But with most of the votes counted, both current Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and opposition candidate Edmundo González […]

In their opening wave of attacks on the Democrats’ likely presidential nominee, some Republicans are homing in on Vice President Kamala Harris’s race and gender — despite certain party leaders’ pleas for them to steer clear. Members of the religious right have dubbed her a “jezebel,” while other conservative activists suggested that she’s slept her […]

From Massachusetts to California, transportation departments are pursuing controversial plans to widen highways, expansions that are sure to compel more people to drive, thus increasing greenhouse gas emissions. Yet state and federal officials are, absurdly, justifying such projects by claiming that they can help fight climate change.   Consider a report issued last fall, in which […]

A new trailer has reignited controversy over a comic book character Marvel Studios intends to introduce onscreen in next year’s Captain America: Brave New World, the fourth installment of the franchise.  The upcoming film will feature Ruth Bat-Seraph, also known by her alter ego, Sabra. In the comics, Sabra is an agent for Mossad, Israel’s […]

My summer Sunday afternoon ritual goes something like this: I wake up, kill time until noon when my local public pool opens, swim for about an hour, then park myself in a lawn chair with a book (and a hat and lots of sunscreen), taking intermittent dips until the lifeguards close the gates in the […]

When you hear someone casually drop the word “fuck,” what’s your reaction? Offended? Surprised? Confused? In any case, I’m fairly certain hearing someone curse out of nowhere provokes some kind of immediate reaction. We have a taboo in this culture against profanity and when someone breaks that taboo, it gets your attention. But why is […]

Olympic athletes: They’re not like us. They eat differently; they sleep differently; and they definitely think differently.  Mindset is a huge part of what makes elite contenders elite, says Kai Laird, who leads a sport and performance psychology group based in Illinois and Virginia. “Athletes who have reached that level are typically all around the […]

Ready or not, the 2024 Paris Olympic Games have begun.  As with any quadrennial, there will be stories of glorious triumph, heartbreaking defeat, feel-good underdogs, and maybe even a villain or two. But headed into Paris this year, one of the main storylines was whether or not the city could properly host the Games — […]

It’s been an eventful couple of weeks, so much so that what I think will ultimately prove one of 2024’s most important revelations largely flew under the radar. That is the revelation that 93-year-old Warren Buffett, whose estimated fortune of $137 billion makes him the fifth-richest person in the US, will no longer give away […]

Bostock v. Clayton County (2020) was one of the few pleasant surprises for liberals to come out of the Supreme Court during the Trump administration.  Authored by Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch and joined by Republican Chief Justice John Roberts, Bostock held that a decades-old federal civil rights law prohibits workplace discrimination on the basis of […]