Ingvar Kamprad, who started Ikea as a teenager, has died at the age of 91. He started with stationery and stockings, but went on to build one of the world’s biggest furniture companies. And the way he did it has revolutionised how retailers operate. There are two facets of modern life that we have Ikea...
The U.S. incarcerates a higher percentage of its citizens than any other country in the world. There’s little doubt among researchers that mass incarceration is wreaking havoc on our society, in particular on people of color, LGBTQ and the poor. What’s often overlooked in this discussion is the damage that prisons and jails do to...
Ray was born in Mexico and moved to the United States with family members at age 10. He told me in an interview in 2014, “I’m just a regular American like everyone else.” In middle school, Ray (a pseudonym to protect his identity) learned the Declaration of Independence and memorized all the presidents in order....
Black History Month is an opportunity to reflect on the historical contributions of black people in the United States. Too often, however, this history focuses on black men, sidelining black women and diminishing their contributions. This is true in mainstream narratives of black nationalist movements in the United States. These narratives almost always highlight the...
If All I Was Was Black unveils Mavis Staples’ sixteenth studio album and third collaboration with Wilco frontman, Jeff Tweedy as producer. It features twelve tracks, some of which are covered below for their ability to cement a convincing narrative, these are in fact fraught times but hope is not lost when we have solidarity...
Volkswagen, the world’s largest carmaker, along with BMW and Daimler, funded experiments in which cynomolgus monkeys and humans breathed in car fumes for hours at a time to produce scientific research data showing that the pollutant load of nitric oxide car emissions from diesel motors had measurably decreased, thanks to modern cleaning technology. We now...
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...
