June 18, 2026

Juneteenth, ancestral healing, and the health of Black families

On June 19, 1865, enslaved Black people in Galveston, Texas learned they were free.  Freedom came two and a half years after the war had ended,delivered at someone else’s convenience. More than 160 years later,…

June 17, 2026

Stop asking whether students used AI

At several recent college commencements, graduates booed speakers who praised artificial intelligence. One student put the contradiction plainly to the Associated Press: students are discouraged and even penalized for using AI, then asked to applaud…

June 16, 2026

The AI race runs on Gulf Oil: What the Iran war reveals about tech geopolitics

On March 1st 2026 Iranian drones struck Amazon AWS data centers in UAE and Bahrain. Banking applications went dark, payments failed across the world and Amazon shifted its ongoing workload to other regions of the…

June 11, 2026

We shouldn't call aging a disease — here's why

Time comes for all of us. No amount of wealth, status, or scientific ambition changes that. Yet a growing movement in medicine wants to classify aging itself as a disease — and eventually cure it….

June 11, 2026

What happens after the graduation applause?

This June, millions of graduating high school seniors across the country may worry about what they will wear or about not tripping as they walk across the stage, or, if they have a name like…

June 10, 2026

We were right about literacy. Why did children have to wait?

For years, parents, educators, researchers, and advocates have been sounding the same alarm: too many children were being denied the opportunity to become proficient readers because schools refused to fully embrace what science already knew….

June 9, 2026

Populist Republicans need to speak softly and carry a big stick – not carry water for union kingpins

So there are some huge pictures of Presidents Trump and Teddy Roosevelt hanging from the Department of Labor building in Washington, DC, right now – recognizing the two presidents who perhaps stood up for the…

June 8, 2026

Social media and understanding the pain of others

The Internet and social media pulled us all together so that our pain could lock us up in our own personal silos to protect us from each other. There is a cruel irony to the…

June 6, 2026

Frank Sinatra 2026: the golden age of the protection racket

If you think that the biggest news in the summer of 2026 is the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, think again. The truest sign of the zeitgeist is not the commemoration of the…

Contributor Spotlight

Dr. Rebecca Vega Thurber