Author: TheConversation

By Wesley Marshall, Professor of Civil Engineering, University of Colorado Denver “Can you name the truck with four-wheel drive, smells like a steak, and seats 35?” Back in 1998, “The Simpsons” joked about the Canyonero, an SUV so big that they were obviously kidding. At that time, it was preposterous to think anyone would drive something that was “12 yards long, two lanes wide, 65 tons of American Pride.” In 2024, that joke is not far from reality. And our reality is one where more pedestrians and bicyclists are getting killed on U.S. streets than at any time in...

By Tobias Dennerlein, Assistant Professor of Management, Purdue University A majority of American workers right now are not feeling very motivated on the job, a new survey suggests. Management experts often encourage business leaders to motivate employees by empowering them. The idea is that when workers are free to make decisions and manage their workday they become more motivated, perform better and work more creatively. However, for decades, employee empowerment initiatives have often failed or fallen short of expectations. Zappos, for example, was once hailed for its no-bosses structure, but that experiment has largely been dismantled and abandoned in...

By Brian Mittendorf, Professor of Accounting, The Ohio State University A revolution in charitable giving is underway due to the growth of donor-advised funds in the United States. Known widely as DAFs, these financial accounts are designated for charitable giving. Donors can get an immediate tax deduction by putting money or other assets into the accounts, and advise the accounts’ managers to give away the money at a later date. After years of concerns about how quickly the money reserved for charity gets distributed and whether donor-advised funds need to operate more transparently, proposed new federal regulations are now...

By Rodney Coates, Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Miami University During the late 1960s, when protests against the Vietnam War erupted across the country, college campuses emerged as places of more than intellectual debate over U.S foreign policy and the country’s deeply racist history. Unlike the protesters against the Israel-Hamas War, many of the college-age demonstrators back then faced the very real possibility of being drafted by the U.S. military and forced to serve in what they considered an unjust war. I was one of the fortunate young Black men who had a deferment that enabled me...

By Susanna Ashton, Professor of English, Clemson University In or around 1825, John Andrew Jackson was born enslaved on a plantation in South Carolina and trained to spend his life picking cotton. But instead of living a life as a slave, he escaped bondage and became an influential anti-slavery lecturer and writer. He also had a key role in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s celebrated novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which historians have argued helped trigger the Civil War by its depiction of the subhuman treatment afforded Black men and women. As a scholar of the lives of enslaved people and their...

By Tracy Fessenden, Professor of Religious Studies, Arizona State University Sixty-five years ago, on July 17, 1959, Billie Holiday died at Metropolitan Hospital in New York. The 44-year-old singer arrived after being turned away from a nearby charity hospital on evidence of drug use, then lay for hours on a stretcher in the hallway, unrecognized and unattended. Her estate amounted to 70 cents in the bank and a roll of bills concealed on her person, her share of the payment for a tabloid interview she gave on her deathbed. Today, Holiday is revered as one of the most influential...