For years, Martin Luther King Jr. and poet Langston Hughes maintained a friendship, exchanging letters and favors and even traveling to Nigeria together in 1960. In 1956, King recited Hughes’ poem “Mother to Son” from the pulpit to honor his wife Coretta, who was celebrating her first Mother’s Day. That same year, Hughes wrote a...
In 2017, just a few days after Donald Trump was sworn in as president, a freshman GOP lawmaker with only a few days on the job of his own, proposed House Resolution 861. Its language was ominous: “The Environmental Protection Agency shall terminate on December 31, 2018.” I was in my sixth year on the...
On March 31, Deadspin produced a video showing a chorus of local news anchors delivering the exact same scripted speech to viewers. The message – denouncing media bias and fake news, calling it a problem that is “neither politically ‘left nor right’” – might seem innocuous enough. But I study the media industry, and it...
Facebook has had a bad few weeks. The social media giant had to apologise for failing to protect the personal data of millions of users from being accessed by data mining company Cambridge Analytica. Outrage is brewing over its admission to spying on people via their Android phones. Its stock price plummeted, while millions deleted...
Geoffrey S. Berman, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, announced that Earl Simmons, known professionally as “DMX” and “X,” was sentenced today in Manhattan federal court to one year in prison for tax fraud in connection with evading the payment of income taxes in the period from 2010 through 2016. ...
When we first visited the school that is the focus of our forthcoming book, “Navigating Conflict: How Youth Handle Trouble in a High-Poverty School,” back in 1995, students were free to move about campus during lunch and other free periods and a culture of trust prevailed. All that changed during the 1999-2000 school year. That’s...
After spending seven months investigating whether China is engaged in unfair trade practices, the Trump administration announced March 22 that it will impose tariffs on as much as US$60 billion in Chinese imports. The tariffs are meant to address two problems: intellectual property theft by China and a steep and persistent trade deficit. As an...
This sentence begins the best article you will ever read. Chances are you thought that last statement might be sarcasm. Sarcasm, as linguist Robert Gibbs noted, includes “words used to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning of a sentence.” A form of irony, it also tends to be directed...
Day after day, we’re bombarded with so many media messages that rarely do we stop to think about what they’re telling us to think, do or feel. Much has been written about the unrealistic beauty standards women have been held to. Female actresses, models and TV personalities are overwhelmingly thin, which has had a detrimental...
The latest shoe has dropped on Facebook: Private data on 50 million users found its way to a shadowy research outfit, Global Science Research, and then on to Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm launched by former White House adviser Steve Bannon. Zuckerberg has come out with a mea culpa for this latest breach of...