Political battles over who will take a seat on the Supreme Court can be traced back to leftist opposition against Robert Bork, whom Reagan nominated, but failed to win the Senate vote. Yet the extent of conservative backlash following Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court nomination by President Obama has been historically unparalleled. Previously, senators have at … Read more
Barack Obama has been a president of many firsts. He’s the first African-American president, he’s the first president to publically support same-sex marriage, and he is the first to host a science fair in the White House. While the first two are very important milestones, the latter may be equally impactful. A self-proclaimed “big science … Read more
Every semester, Professor Kay Merseth begins her course “Dilemmas of Equity and Excellence in American K-12 Education” with a call to action: “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” However, most students enter Longfellow Hall for the first lecture excited, not outraged. Merseth’s class is so popular that many students must enter the lottery … Read more
The 1964 U.S. presidential election was the most lopsided election in U.S. history by popular vote—Democratic candidate Lyndon Johnson crushed his Republican rival, Barry Goldwater, by a margin of 61 percent to 39 percent. While the margins this year probably won’t be as wide, the parallels between 2016 and 1964 should serve as an ominous … Read more
On Nov. 20, 2014, NYPD officer Peter Liang accidentally shot and killed African-American man Akai Gurley in Brooklyn’s Louis H. Pink Houses. The Polarized Truth On Nov. 20, 2014, Peter Liang, a rookie NYPD officer, entered a dark stairwell inside the Louis H. Pink Houses, one of the most dangerous housing projects in Brooklyn. Officer … Read more
On Super Tuesday, the inconceivable became conceivable. Barring a potentially messy brokered convention in Cleveland this summer, Donald Trump has emerged as the inevitable GOP nominee. One of America’s two major parties, the party of the “Great Emancipator” Abraham Lincoln, is now led by a bombastic billionaire businessman who refused four times last Sunday to disavow the endorsement … Read more
News coverage of the Super Tuesday results focused heavily on the dominance of the two frontrunners, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Several analysts predicted that Hillary Clinton’s wins in seven of the 11 states that voted, as well as American Samoa, would be the beginning of the end for the upstart campaign of Vermont Senator … Read more
September 12, 2001. On that day, millions of Americans woke up shaken, wondering who or what could have been responsible for the murder of thousands. In the weeks that followed, the terrorist organization al Qaeda declared responsibility, a claim verified by the U.S. government. In the ensuing War on Terror, the United States and its … Read more
In the 1990s, urban development expert Christopher Leinberger dubbed Atlanta the poster child for urban sprawl, and “the name kind of stuck.” The city’s suburbs were growing at a rapid pace, adding over a million people between 1990 and 2000. With MARTA, the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority, confined within city limits because of worries … Read more
On February 9, David Joseph, an unarmed African American teen, was killed by a police officer in Austin, Texas. Joseph, a student at Premier High School, had plans to further his education in college this coming fall. Joseph is just another victim of a larger national trend that needs to be reversed. In 2015, 224 … Read more