New fossil finds over the past few years have been forcing anthropologists to reexamine our evolutionary path to becoming human. Now the earliest modern human fossil ever found outside the continent of Africa is pushing back the date for when our ancestors left Africa. The fossil, an upper left jawbone with most of the teeth...
In a speech at the 2018 World Economic Forum held in Davos, Switzerland, French President Emmanuel Macron said he wanted to “make France a model in the fight against climate change” and promised to shut all coal-fired power plants by 2021 – two years earlier than the timetable put forward by his predecessor. While...
In the United States, inequality tends to be framed as an issue of either class, race or both. Consider, for example, criticism that Republicans’ new tax plan is a weapon of “class warfare,” or accusations that the recent U.S. government shutdown was racist. As an India-born novelist and scholar who teaches in the United States,...
Hidden just beneath the surface of the ongoing heated debate about immigration in the United States lurks an often unspoken concern: language. Specifically, whether immigration from Spanish-speaking countries threatens the English language’s dominance. Language and immigration have long been politically linked in the U.S. When Farmers Branch, Texas, passed an English-only “requirement” in 2006, then-Mayor...
North and South Korean athletes will march under one flag during the opening ceremony of the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics in South Korea. The “Korean Unification Flag” is both a highly symbolic marker of reconciliation and a reminder of a divided Korea, a condition that has lasted since 1945. As a scholar of East Asian...
The federal government is on the brink of shutting down for the first time in a little more than four years after Republicans and Democrats appeared unable to agree on a last-minute deal to keep funds flowing for another few weeks. The immediate and most visible impact would be in the government’s day-to-day operations. Many...
Last month, the Chicago Bears, Blackhawks, Bulls, Cubs, and White Sox formed an alliance to support solutions to reduce violent crime in Chicago. Operating as the Chicago Sports Alliance, the group, in its first year, will donate $1 million in one-time grants to support three programs in the city: Choose 2 Change (C2C), a mentoring...
Fifty years ago, on Jan. 21, 1968, the Cold War grew significantly colder. It was on this day that an American B-52G Stratofortress bomber, carrying four nuclear bombs, crashed onto the sea ice of Wolstenholme Fjord in the northwest corner of Greenland, one of the coldest places on Earth. Greenland is part of the Kingdom...
Suddenly, popular media is saturated with stories of powerful men outed by women for behavior in the workplace. These alleged harassers seem to assume that power in the workplace grants them sexual access to anyone. In medieval Europe, most people assumed the same thing, although they didn’t call it “harassment.” As a historian of...
Has the word and concept of “iconic” become greatly overused? The word combines our attitudes toward people, places and things that are not only great but heralded, cherished and placed on exemplary lists. But there is a growing tendency by some to use “iconic” in a cheeky fashion, especially in social media forums (iconic pet memes?).
