Politics & Current Events

When a Rumor Becomes a Story Social media can turn an allegation into something that looks like established fact before anybody has determined whether the story is true. A provocative photograph, video, screenshot, or accusation can travel across YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, and other platforms within hours. Once a recognizable public figure such as Roland Martin

A Different Kind of Senate Campaign in Michigan Abdul El-Sayed’s nomination for the U.S. Senate in Michigan has become about more than the usual differences between two political candidates. El-Sayed, a physician, epidemiologist, former Detroit health director, and Muslim American of Egyptian heritage, is running against Republican Mike Rogers. His nomination placed his religion, heritage,

When Economic Policy Reaches the Kitchen Table For most Americans, the economy is not something we experience through charts, stock reports, or speeches coming out of Washington. It becomes real when we sit at the kitchen table, spread out the bills, and realize the money coming in does not stretch as far as it used

The Numbers Behind Workplace Equality For roughly sixty years, the federal government has required many American employers to report basic demographic information about the people working inside their organizations. The best-known of these reports is the EEO-1, which generally covers private employers with at least 100 employees along with certain federal contractors with 50 or

When the Numbers Become Part of the War There comes a troubling point in a prolonged war when the argument is no longer only about strategy, territory, diplomacy, or who believes they are winning. It also becomes an argument about how we count the people who have already paid the price. That question now sits

Orwell’s Most Frightening Machine Was Almost Ordinary One of the most disturbing ideas in George Orwell’s 1984 was not some massive weapon, secret prison, or complicated torture machine. It was something almost ordinary called the Memory Hole. In Orwell’s fictional world, documents that contradicted the government’s newest version of reality could simply be dropped into