United States Archives - Page 33 of 73

Feature

Older Black Workers Face More Risk in Economic Downturns

March 2018 Unemployment Report for Workers Over 55

April 8, 2018 • by Teresa Ghilarducci

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) today reported a 3.2% unemployment rate for workers age 55 and older in March, a rate unchanged since February. For decades, economists have documented that the racial gap in unemployment rates is widest at the depth of a recession and narrowest right before the economy goes into recession. In ...

Older Black Workers Face More Risk in Economic Downturns

Feature

Seeing Is Believing

The Marchers of #MarchForOurLives

April 8, 2018 • by Yvonne M. Vissing

The national and international march for gun safety catalyzed by the Parkland students would be a feat for anyone of any age. But these are teenagers who have triggered a social movement. Although only time will tell what becomes of it, that the young are in charge gives me hope that this movement will stand ...

Uncategorized

Damon Linker is Wrong About Liberals

Here’s why

April 3, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

Damon Linker is a respected writer, columnist for The Week, and editor (University of Pennsylvania Press). He is also a Facebook friend of mine. I enjoy his columns, and often exchange comments with him. He has offered strong and admirable criticisms of Trump, and of the ways the Republican party and ...

Feature

How Populists Become Popular

The speculative shift in politics

April 3, 2018 • by Péter Csigó

In the past decades, we have all learned to see politics as a popularity contest where politicians use polls to detect the position of the popular majority and try to sell this position in their media appearances. There is a common tendency to see populist figures like Donald Trump or ...

Feature

Is Alex Israel for Real?

Sun, sincerity and simulacra in SPF-18

April 2, 2018 • by Nicola Sayers

The campy, nostalgic, Hollywood-inspired works of young(ish) artist Alex Israel would not be out of place as the scenery for a nineties-California-themed party, yet they regularly sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars – sometimes more – and he has had solo exhibitions in prestigious galleries globally. Israel’s first major ...

Feature

Democratic Crisis and the Politics of Social Media

Claire Potter on her upcoming Democracy & Diversity Institute course

March 25, 2018 • by TCDS

“One of the things that’s so interesting about Democracy and social media today is that it’s a paradox… I think all the possibilities for social media being a democratic space are still there, but recent history suggests that social media has also been complicit in foreclosing Democracy, not just in ...

Democratic Crisis and the Politics of Social Media

Feature

The Fox News-Fake News-Trump Nexus

On the link between political orientation and the inclination to believe fake news

March 24, 2018 • by Sanford Schram and Richard Fording

In today’s overheated political climate, people are increasingly noting how difficult it is to convince others, who disagree, to alter their beliefs. Public discourse seems ever more compartmentalized in “silos,” where people express themselves in an “echo chamber” or “bubble” that reinforces their pre-existing biases. Contravening facts rarely get in ...

Feature

The Practical and Principled Gray Argument for Democratic Party Solidarity

Reflections of an Unreconstructed Deaniac

March 23, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

I am a committed partisan of “the democratic wing of the Democratic Party,” and have been so ever since Howard Dean ran for Democratic nomination to be President of the United States in 2004. I worked for his candidacy, wrote about it in The Politics of Small Things, and later wrote about ...

The Practical and Principled Gray Argument for Democratic Party Solidarity

Feature

Authenticity, American Style

The meaning of authenticity in the era of “reality show” politics

March 23, 2018 • by Jeremy Safran

In her 2012 book The Politics of Authenticity in American Presidential Campaigns, Erica Seifert documents the growing importance over a 25-year period of the voters’ perception of candidates’ authenticity in determining the outcome of presidential elections. In recent years Al Gore, John Kerry and Mitt Romney’s bids for the presidency were all ...

Education

What Walkouts Teach Students

A Report from San Diego

March 20, 2018 • by Elaine Lewinnek

Sometimes in San Diego County, when too many people run their air-conditioning all at once, we have blackouts. The first time a blackout happened after I moved here, one neighbor shouted across the street to me: “There’s a blackout! I think it might be terrorism! But don’t worry, I have ...

Feature

The Curious Case of the Growing Placebo Effect

Evidence suggests that placebo effects are becoming more powerful

March 19, 2018 • by Jeremy Safran

Over the last several years evidence has been accumulating that placebo effects are becoming more powerful. Clinical trials on a range of medications used for treating both psychological and medical problems, are finding that differences in the magnitude of their impact relative to placebos are decreasing in size. For example, in ...