Author: TheConversation

By Roger J. Kreuz, Associate Dean and Professor of Psychology, University of Memphis A linguistic arms race is raging online, and it is not clear who is winning. On one side are social networks like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. These sites have become better and better at identifying and removing language and content that violates their community standards. Social media users are on the other side, and they’ve come up with coded terminology designed to evade algorithmic detection. These expressions are collectively referred to as “algospeak.” New terms like these are just the latest development in the history of...

By Theresa E. Gildner, Assistant Professor of Biological Anthropology, Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis Intestinal infections take a heavy toll on impoverished Black communities that have out-of-date sewage systems. These infections often spread through contaminated soil and water and are among the most common diseases worldwide. Approximately one-quarter of the global population is infected with soil-transmitted helminths, intestinal parasitic worms that can cause serious health problems. Additionally, up to 50% of people around the world are infected with Helicobacter pylori, bacteria that live in the stomach and can cause ulcers and cancer. I am a...

By Viola Franziska Müller, Postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in history, University of Bonn For generations, the Underground Railroad has been the quintessential story of resistance against oppression. Yet, the story is incomplete. What is far less known is that the majority of enslaved people who fled Southern slavery before the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation never crossed the Mason-Dixon line to freedom in the Northern states. Instead, they remained within the slaveholding Southern states. As a scholar of slavery, labor and resistance, I have written about the thousands of enslaved Black people who gravitated to the burgeoning cities and towns of...

By Christian Appy, Professor of History, UMass Amherst The history-making whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg, who by leaking the Pentagon Papers revealed longtime government doubts and deceit about the Vietnam War and inspired acts of retaliation by President Richard Nixon that helped lead to his resignation, died of pancreatic cancer on June 16 at the age of 92. In 1971, when Daniel Ellsberg arrived at a federal court in Boston, a journalist asked if he was concerned about the prospect of going to prison for leaking a 7,000-page top-secret history of the Vietnam War. Ellsberg responded with a question of his...