Fifty-seven years after Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at the 1963 March on Washington, thousands of protesters for racial justice again gathered on the National Mall in Washington, DC. It was an emotional day of protesting against police violence, the culmination of a summer of nationwide protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death.
Rev. Al Sharpton, who first announced the “Get Your …
04neighborhood_materials.pdfSummer is coming to an end, and as we head back to school here on the Island of Explained, we’re thinking about the fun times we’ve had with the Experimoth and Bored the Whale. But we’re also thinking about some of the hard issues this summer has raised: news about people being killed because of the color of their skin.
So we’re devoting our fourth, and final, episode of Today, Explained to Kids summer series to systemic racism. We talk with Kennedy Mitchum, a recent college grad who got Merriam-Webster to update its definition of racism; Morgan Givens, …
House Democrats have had enough with another member of President Donald Trump’s administration flouting oversight requests: On Friday, they launched contempt of Congress proceedings against Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliot Engel (D-NY) cited Pompeo’s noncooperation with President Donald Trump’s impeachment inquiry, his speech this week at the Republican National Convention, and his promotion of “a Senate Republican-led smear against the president’s political rivals,” which represented an “alarming” disregard for laws over his own conduct.
Drafting a resolution is the first step in a process that could ultimately conclude with the House voting to hold …
On August 6, President Trump issued an executive order prohibiting transactions with the video-sharing app TikTok. Since the app is owned by the Beijing-based ByteDance, it could pose national security and privacy risks to users in the US, the order states.
But the Trump administration’s actions targeting TikTok mark a departure from the traditional American techno-libertarian position on internet governance and free speech online. And it comes at a time when the concept of a global internet is under threat.
Nations are increasingly pursuing various forms of internet sovereignty, from Russia building a walled-off intranet to India regularly shutting down …
Black Panther star Chadwick Boseman has died at age 43 of colon cancer, according to his family, in a shocking announcement made Friday night.
“Chadwick was diagnosed with stage III colon cancer in 2016, and battled with it these last four years as it progressed to stage IV,” Boseman’s family said in a statement posted to his Twitter account. “From Marshall to Da 5 Bloods, August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and several more, all were filmed during and between countless surgeries and chemotherapy.”
Boseman’s cancer diagnosis wasn’t public knowledge prior to his passing. Back in April, …
Just last week, Facebook finally banned militia groups and pages that advocate for violence on its platform. But Recode’s quick Facebook search for “militia” groups and pages on Friday surfaced over a dozen results for national and local militia groups, most of them private, with many of them openly calling for violence against protesters.
Two of these groups that Recode accessed had a combined 25,000 members and included posts where members encouraged and celebrated shooting people involved in recent Black Lives Matter protests. Some groups did not contain “militia” in the title but still encouraged members to take up arms. …
One Good Thing is Vox’s recommendations feature. In each edition, find one more thing from the world of culture that we highly recommend.
At the end of High Flying Bird, a rookie NBA player receives a gift bestowed to him by his former agent: 1969’s seminal The Revolt of the Black Athlete, by sociologist and civil rights activist Harry Edwards.
It is then that the full meaning of Steven Soderbergh’s unconventional sports drama, released on Netflix in February 2019, becomes clear. In a crisp 90 minutes, the film covers thorny issues of labor and class, of dreams lost …
The honey extractor is probably among the most expensive individual equipment pieces that a beekeeper will likely buy. But if you are lucky enough, there is a chance that your association already owns one or several extractors that you can hire or borrow when needed. However, if you ever use one, it is important that you thoroughly and completely clean the equipment before you return or store it. …
Neuralink, the mysterious neuroscience company backed by Elon Musk, is expected to reveal more details about its plans to connect computers to human brains on Friday. While the development of this futuristic-sounding tech is still in its early stages, the presentation is expected to demonstrate the second version of a small, robotic device that inserts tiny electrode threads through the skull and into the brain. Musk says he’ll “show neurons firing in real-time. The matrix in the matrix.”
Like building underground car tunnels and sending private rockets to Mars, this Musk-backed endeavor is incredibly ambitious, but it builds …
As a general rule, President Donald Trump likes talking about the stock market. Throughout his tenure in the White House, he has tried to set it up as a measure of his success. And during the Covid-19 pandemic, his focus on stocks has become perhaps even more pronounced as he and his advisers point to its quick (and somewhat confounding) recovery as evidence that the US economy is fine.
Heading into the Republican National Convention, I figured the Dow Jones Industrial Average would be a star of the show. And then it just … wasn’t. In fact, mention of one …