For my recently published book, “The Ledger and the Chain,” I visited more than 30 archives in over a dozen states, from Louisiana to Connecticut. Along the way, I uncovered mountains of material that exposed the depravity of the men who ran the largest domestic slave trading operation in American history and revealed the fortitude...
In his autobiography, Miles Davis complained that classical musicians were like robots. He spoke from experience – he’d studied classical music at Juilliard and recorded with classical musicians even after becoming a world-renowned jazz artist. As a music professor at the University of Florida, which is transforming itself into an “AI university,” I often think...
The 4 million inhabitants of five U.S. territories – Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Northern Marianas Islands, Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands – do not have the full protection of the Constitution, because of a series of Supreme Court cases dating back to 1901 that are based on archaic, often racist language and reasoning. No...
The big idea The number of people killed by police officers in the U.S. has been massively underreported in official statistics over the past four decades, with an additional 17,000 deaths over that period, according to our new research. Our study, which was published on Oct. 2, 2021, in The Lancet, compared statistics from the...
A paper published in the journal Nature Energy identifies five ways that people of high socioeconomic status have a disproportionate impact on global greenhouse gas emissions – and therefore an outsized responsibility to facilitate progress in climate change mitigation. In their roles as consumers, investors, role models, organisational participants, and citizens, people in this group can help shape...
Looking at data stretching from 1992 to 2019, the analysis, published in the journal Educational Review, revealed that 10-year-olds in US states with bigger gaps in income did less well in maths than those living in areas of America where earnings were more evenly distributed. With income inequality in the US the highest in the developed...
India is one of the world’s largest food producers. However, insufficient refrigeration possibilities and other bottlenecks in the supply chain result in a waste of up to a third of the food produced – an estimated billion-dollar loss. Only 6% of the food moves through the cold chain, compared to about 60% in developed countries....
As the Supreme Court’s fall term begins, a new survey from the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania finds that more than a third of Americans say they might be willing to abolish the Supreme Court or have Congress limit its jurisdiction if the court were to make decisions they or Congress disagreed with....
When you’re stressed, do you ever feel like you just don’t want to be around other people? According to a Dartmouth study, greater levels of stress on a given day were found to be predictive of decreases in social interaction the following day. The results are published in the journal Emotion. “For our study, we wanted...
The ventilators, which are required by patients in intensive care units (ICU) who are seriously ill with respiratory diseases like COVID-19, flu, and tuberculosis, are both simpler and cheaper to make than currently available ventilators. Now, the creators of the designs hope that their promising technology, initially developed for emergency short-term ventilators in response to the...
