recent posts
- Channeling Collective Fury into Fat Justice Is the Transformational Power We Need: Part 2
- Channeling Collective Fury into Fat Justice Is the Transformational Power We Need: Part 1
- Our Dizzying, Repeating Cycles of Cultural Amnesia Around Sex Ed: Part 2
- Our Dizzying, Repeating Cycles of Cultural Amnesia Around Sex Ed: Part 1
- We’ll Be Hiding from the Rainfall for These Beacon Beach Reads
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Category: American Society
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by Mara Sapon-Shevin When I was in middle-school, the way the “popular kids” tormented those of us who weren’t so lucky, was through something called “Slam Books.” A popular kid (it was usually a girl) would start a notebook with individual pages headed with the names of unpopular students. The book would be passed around…
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"Near Arctic, Seed Vault Is a Fort Knox of Food", in the New York Times last week, discussed the efforts to create a seed repository as a backup of our seed supply. Claire Hope Cummings, in her new book, Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds, discusses the "Doomsday Vault" in more depth,…
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Jay Wexler is Professor of Law at Boston University. He is the author of Holy Hullabaloos: A Road Trip to the Battlegrounds of the Church/State Wars and The Odd Clauses: Understanding the Constitution through Ten of Its Most Curious Provisions. The Supreme Court has a lovely tradition whereby each Justice’s group of law clerks gets to go out to lunch…
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By Chris Mercogliano I am in absolute agreement with Bruce E. Levine: it isn’t ODD at all that our society has stepped up its efforts to pathologize young people with biopsychiatric labels like Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and Oppositional Defiance Disorder (ODD), when they either cannot or will not march in step with the majority…
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A link rescue from the not-to-distant past: Carl Elliott, who has a forthcoming Beacon book about consumerism and corruption in the medical industry, had a harrowing piece in the New Yorker about professional human guinea pigs, which is now available on their website. Most professional guinea pigs are involved in Phase I clinical trials, in…
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by Barbara Katz Rothman It’s an interesting historical moment to be a white mother of a Black child, as another white mother’s Black child is running for president of the United States. Who’d have thought? I too am a white mother of a Black child. When my Black child, Victoria, was in kindergarten or maybe…
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by Sasha Abramsky In the years after World War II, California’s prisons were seen as being some of the most progressive correctional institutions in America. They were generally well funded, and the officials in charge of the system had a real interest in utilizing new rehabilitation tools within their facilities. In the late 1960s and…
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by David R. Dow When the death penalty was resurrected in 1976, following a brief four-year hiatus, death penalty lawyers made a fateful tactical decision. They decided to abandon the goal of abolition and instead elected to chip away gradually. Rather than arguing that the death penalty is always unconstitutional – that it is necessarily…
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by Mark Winne An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.—Plutarch We have in America today a tale of two food systems—one for the poor and one for everyone else. The poor cobble together their week’s groceries from a combination of food stamps, food bank donations, and…
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Read the Spirit, an ambitious and thoughtful site devoted to issues of spirituality and religion, is devoting a portion of their impressive energies to a month of Interfaith Heroes. Featured so far, brief, illuminating essays on the lives of such disparate voices for tolerance as Moses Maimonides, Jaluddin Muhammed Akbar, and Roger Williams. (Incidentally, we…
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