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?).
So far, the new year has not gone well for Venezuela. Neither did 2017 or 2016, of course, but it turns out a bad crisis can always get worse. January 2018 began with riots and looting of grocery stores across the country, a sign of pervasive hunger. Then, on Jan. 12, a crowd stormed a...
All across the U.S., rural communities’ residents are being left out of modern society and the 21st century economy. I’ve traveled to Kansas, Maine, Texas and other states studying internet access and use – and I hear all the time from people with a crucial need still unmet. Rural Americans want faster, cheaper internet like...
In the 1930s, parents across the U.S. were panicked. A new documentary, “Reefer Madness,” suggested that evil marijuana dealers lurked in public schools, waiting to entice their children into a life of crime and degeneracy. The documentary captured the essence of the anti-marijuana campaign started by Harry Anslinger, a government employee eager to make a...
How often do you, outside the requirements of an assignment, ponder things like the workings of a distant star, the innards of your phone camera, or the number and layout of petals on a flower? Maybe a little bit, maybe never. Too often, people regard science as sitting outside the general culture: A specialized, difficult...
