How the Refrigerator Became an Agent of Climate Catastrophe–Much of the world’s recent growth in cooling capability has been an adaptive response to global warming. The problem is self-perpetuating, because the electricity that refrigerators and air-conditioners run on is mostly generated by burning fossil fuels. There are other climate impacts. Hydrofluorocarbons—which, for decades, have been the volatile compounds circulating inside most new cooling equipment—were widely adopted as refrigerants because they don’t have the same destructive effect on the Earth’s ozone layer as their immediate predecessors, chlorofluorocarbons. But hydrofluorocarbons are greenhouse gases with hundreds or thousands of times the warming potential of carbon dioxide. www.newyorker.com
Could a 54-year-old civil rights law be revived?–Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination on April 4, 1968, helped usher in the passage of the Fair Housing Act (FHA), a law that promised to not only stop unjust discrimination but also reverse decades of government-created segregation. The FHA, which made discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status, and disability illegal in the process of buying and selling homes, had already failed to pass Congress in two earlier versions. As Michelle Adams wrote for the New Yorker, the 1968 version would likely have met the same end if not for the political impact of the assassination. www.vox.com
We Still Need Martin Luther King Jr.’s Aspirational Patriotism–Today the spiritual descendants of the complacent white middle-class ministers whom King excoriated in his “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” support battles against the restoration of voting rights, the teaching of honest American history about racism, and the redistribution of unearned wealth. And in their railing against the alleged excesses of “woke” ideology they have the gall to paint themselves as the true victims of racism. Even worse yet, many opponents of the fight for racial justice purport to be disciples of King, pretending he would exult in a “color-blind” America in which the end of state-enforced segregation accomplished all of his goals. nymag.com
Can America’s Political Polarization Be Fixed?–We have not just lost faith in one another; we have also been losing faith in most of the institutions that have served as the foundation of our society, like organized religion, public schools, and government. But instead of thinking of this crumbling of traditional institutions as proof of a coming apocalypse, it may also be the tipping point toward the creation of a new, twenty-first century institutional model; in other words, not just the end of one era but the beginning of another. democracyjournal.org
How Much Can Dietary Changes and Food Production Practices Help Mitigate Climate Change?–"The fundamental problem with climate change is that it's a collective problem, but it rises out of lots of individual decisions. Society's challenge is to figure out how we can influence those decisions in a way that generates a more positive collective outcome," says Keith Wiebe, senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute.* psmag.com
The Emancipation Proclamation: Annotated–In this second document in our Annotations series, we’ve collected scholarship around Lincoln’s progress toward issuing the Proclamation (including his deliberations between decision and Proclamation), his concerns about the Constitutionality of, and possible challenges to it, the responses of Americans to the decree, and how views of Lincoln held by lay people (and historians) have changed through time. We hope you find it a valuable resource for yourself, and for students. daily.jstor.org
The Arts and Social Justice: Bedfellows?–Take, for instance, the recent controversy at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre and Dance: a prominent composer, Bright Sheng, has been temporarily relieved of teaching responsibilities because students petitioned for his termination. Sheng shared with his composition class Laurence Olivier’s version of Shakespeare’s Othello. As anyone who remembers this 1965 film will recall, Olivier not only uses dark make-up to emulate a Moorish general; being Olivier, he also elaborately alters his pronunciation, vocal registration, and gestural vocabulary. The protesting Michigan students considered his performance an odious exercise in blackface. www.americanpurpose.com
Routine Maintenance–Among the automation evangelists—entrepreneurs, innovation consultants, “thought leaders”—such reassurances often slide into an emancipatory, if not utopian, register. Duncan Wardle, a former Disney executive, echoes the popular refrain that “the rise of robots will only make us more human,” as it will allow us to embrace our core strengths—intuition, curiosity, creativity, and imagination. harpers.org
The Soldiers Came Home Sick. The Government Denied It Was Responsible–Miller was baffled to see formerly healthy soldiers gasping for air after mild exertion. Some of them had been close to the fire at the Mishraq sulfur mine outside Mosul, thought to be the largest release of sulfur dioxide ever caused by humans. But others had never gone anywhere near the burning mine. Some of them could no longer run or climb stairs, and yet their X-rays and pulmonary-function tests looked normal. www.nytimes.com
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