Affective polarization is a term that describes how individuals tend to see their opposing political parties in a negative light and their co-partisans in a positive light. This bias can unknowingly cause ignorance and lead to less effective cooperation and understanding between groups and people of different parties. This psychological mindset is dangerous as it […]
Will we ever meet in the middle? Read More »
Climate change is one of the biggest health crises humanity faces, according to the World Health Organization. It is all-consuming, impacting almost every aspect of our daily lives. However, we very rarely look beyond greenhouse gas burning to the root cause of how climate change became what we know it as today: philosophy. Similar to
With 574 recognized tribes in the United States alone, the Indigenous people of North America have a diverse population, diverse culture, and a diversity of languages. At the turn of the twenty-first century, there were approximately 210 Native American languages still spoken in North America, according to linguist Michael Krauss in his paper “Status of
Language death and the decline of minority cultures Read More »
In many ways, science is a discussion. Many within the community know all too well about the rivalries and bickerings between academics and scientists, the workplace politics that plague every human endeavor. However, the way that we’re usually taught science emphasizes facts: 1 + 1 = 2, the Earth is a sphere, and gravity will
Trusting the dialectics of science Read More »
According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, in 2020, 82.4 million people worldwide were forcibly displaced from their homes, almost double the number in 2010. Forty-two percent of displaced people in 2020 were children. The number of refugees worldwide is rising, but the United States is accepting less and less. In Barack Obama’s last full
Fields once green and lush, pockmarked and rife with forgotten land mines. Two cities, hundreds of thousands of lives, gone in an instant. Shrapnel in trees, poisoned air, scorched earth. These are the devastating effects of war. Like carbon emissions, oil spills, and deforestation, most of the environmental disasters we face today are man-made. War
War! What is it good for? Destroying the environment Read More »
Everyone knows the color wheel; red, yellow, and blue combine to make orange, green, and purple, all of which combine to make the spectrum. While this system works well for understanding pigments, it breaks down when considering mixtures of light, where red and green make yellow and white is a tertiary color. To explain these
Color: The most beautiful lie ever told Read More »
The 2016 presidential election and victory of Donald Trump marked the start of a period scholars call the “post-truth” era. While this concept isn’t new, a post-truth society is characterized by the absence of shared objective standards for truth in favor of appeals to emotion or personal beliefs. Today, many politicians appeal to the emotional
Post-truth politics and the future state of knowledge Read More »
At first glance, the English, Hindi, Russian, and German languages seem quite different from one another. They use seemingly unique sounds, letters, and ways of translating ideas into words. Thus, it may come as a surprise to learn that these languages are all descended, so to speak, from a common ancestor, much like all the
On the origin of languages: Our Proto-Indo-European roots Read More »