Tag: human history
The Black Box of Race
My daughter Maggie gave birth to Ellie, my granddaughter, by C‑section on a Saturday afternoon in November of 2014. That evening, my son‑in‑law, Aaron, came over for a warm hug and a celebratory shot of bourbon. I listened to Aaron’s play‑by‑play of the events, and after a decent pause, I asked the question that I had wanted to ask all along:
“Did you check the box?”
Without missing a beat, my good son‑in‑law responded, “Yes, sir. I did.”
“Very
What Happened to Baseball Jerseys?
Last week, as American sports fans’ eyes moved from football to baseball, a great cry—or at least a significant grumble—was heard from MLB players arriving at spring training: The new uniforms are bad.
The MLB announced the uniforms, which have been redesigned by Nike for all of the league’s 30 teams, in a press release last Tuesday. It included praise from some of the biggest baseball names on Nike’s endorsement roster. As images of the uniforms began to circulate, however,
A Yankee Apology for Reconstruction
A 2021 study of memorials in America counted 5,917 monuments that memorialize the Civil War. In that total, only 1 percent include the word slavery; Yale’s Civil War Memorial is not among that 1 percent.
The memorial stands in one of the busiest corridors on campus. Four bas-relief figures—symbolizing courage, devotion, peace, and memory—surround tablets bearing the names of Yale men who fought and died for both sides. Verses of a poem, “The Blue and the Gray,” are etched
The Dance Floor Deserves Your Respect
A shock awaited Drake’s fans when they first hit “Play” on his latest album. A gentle instrumental intro lulled the ears for 37 seconds. Then the second track, “Falling Back,” cut in, the audio equivalent of a jump scare in a horror movie. The bigger surprise was this new song’s sound: a beat not built on the woozy, asymmetrical rhythms that characterize much of modern hip-hop and R&B, but rather upon the sort of steady thump that has kept dance
The Story of Fred, a Mastodon
In 1998, outside of Fort Wayne, Indiana, a hydraulic excavator at Buesching’s Peat Moss & Mulch stripped back a layer of peat and struck bone in the underlying marl. Bone is the right word: This bone belonged to a mastodon, and mastodons are still fresh bodies in the dirt, not petrified fossils entombed in the rock. Although they might be popularly imagined living way back with the dinosaurs, the Ice Age megafauna went extinct only moments ago, in staggered waves
What Did Medieval Peasants Know?
In the foreword to her book A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, the historian Barbara W. Tuchman offered a warning to people with simplistic ideas about what life was like in the medieval world, and what that might say about humanity as a whole: You think you know, but you have no idea.
The period, which spans roughly 500 to 1500, presents some problems for people trying to craft uncomplicated stories. “No age is tidy or made of whole
Ben Sasse on America’s Political Addiction Problem.
Ben Sasse is worried about midlife crises. Not just for himself, but for every working American who feels that their future in the face of technological disruption is not as secure as that of previous generations. “We’re the first people in human history that are really going to see the end of lifelong work,” the Republican senator from Nebraska told The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg. “That unsettling of community and place raises lots of fundamental questions about
The Millennials Not Having Babies Because of Climate Change
Miley Cyrus vowed not to have a baby on a “piece-of-shit planet.” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez mused in an Instagram video about whether it’s still okay to have children. Polls suggest that a third or more of Americans younger than 45 either don’t have children or expect to have fewer than they might otherwise because they are worried about climate change. Millennials and Gen Z are not the first generations to face the potential of imminent, catastrophic, irreversible change to the