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Breaking News

This page features brief excerpts of stories published by the mainstream media and, less frequently, blogs, alternative media, and even obviously biased sources. The excerpts are taken directly from the websites cited in each source note. Quotation marks are not used.

  • SOURCE: Washington Post
    6/14/2023

    As More Schools Ban "Maus," Art Spiegelman Fears Worse to Come

    “It’s a real warning sign of a country that’s yearning for a return of authoritarianism,” Spiegelman tells Post columnist Greg Sargent of the challenge made against his graphic-format Holocaust history by residents of Nixa, Missouri. 

  • SOURCE: PEN America
    6/13/2023

    PEN Condemns Censorship in Removal of Coates's Memoir from AP Course

    Several students reported their teacher using terms that mirrored the language of the state law—claiming the lesson "made them ashamed to be Caucasian"—resulting in the school board's decision to remove the book from an Advanced Placement Language course. 

  • SOURCE: SPLC Learning for Justice
    6/12/2019

    Teaching Hard Histories Through Juneteenth

    A celebration of freedom should put the work of the people who fought and struggled to achieve it at the center; thinking of freedom as something achieved instead of something granted. 

  • SOURCE: The New Atlantis
    6/12/2023

    Hollywood Has Abandoned the Citizen-Inventor

    After generations of populist inventors making the things they need, Hollywood has framed our relationship to invention as receiving the gifts bestowed on us by plutocrats. 

  • SOURCE: The Guardian
    6/1/2023

    The Debt Ceiling Law is now a Tool of Partisan Political Power; Abolish It

    by Mark Weisbrot

    There is no "ticking bomb" of national debt; the use of the debt ceiling to threaten the nation with default to secure spending cuts that damage Democratic presidents is by now a clearly established partisan trick, and the US government should no longer be held hostage to it, says an economic policy researcher. 

  • SOURCE: Washington Post
    6/1/2023

    Kagan, Sotomayor Join SCOTUS Cons in Sticking it to Unions

    By an 8-1 vote, with only Ketanji Brown Jackson in dissent, the Court allowed employers to bypass the National Labor Relations Board to seek potentially crippling tort judgments against unions for business losses related to strikes, removing a major incentive for good-faith negotiation by employers. 

  • SOURCE: Slate
    6/1/2023

    New Evidence: Rehnquist Pretty Much OK with Plessy v. Ferguson

    by Richard Hasen and Dahlia Lithwick

    A 1952 memo that Rehnquist wrote defending "separate but equal" was raised during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings and dismissed as work-for-hire. It is now clear that he supported the narrow interpretation of the 14th Amendment that the current court majority hopes to use to undermine civil rights. 

  • SOURCE: The Atlantic
    6/1/2023

    Richard Rothstein: The Problem with Class-Based Affirmative Action

    While Black Americans are disproportionately poor, argues a scholar of discriminatory policy, the larger numbers of poor whites make it likely that class-based admissions preferences will fail to address racial disparities, including concentrated poverty in Black communities. 

  • SOURCE: The Nation
    5/26/2023

    When Tina Turner Rocked Out for the McGovern Campaign

    As the cash-strapped campaign approached election day, Shirley MacLaine organized a concert featuring women performers to tout McGovern's antiwar position. Turner headlined the largest woman-organized rally in history.