Author: TheConversation

By Peter Dreier, E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics, Occidental College In his 1990 autobiography, “Behind the Mask: My Double Life in Baseball,” Dave Pallone, a gay major league umpire who was quietly fired in 1988 after rumors about his sexual orientation circulated in the baseball world, contended that there were enough gay major league players to create an All-Star team. Since then, attitudes and laws about homosexuality have changed. High-profile figures in business, politics, show business, education, the media, the military and sports have come out of the closet. Athletes in three of the five major U.S. male...

By Mathew Sandoval, Lecturer in Culture & Performance, Arizona State University As a Mexican-American who celebrates Día de los Muertos, or the Day of the Dead, at the end of October and beginning of November, I have noted an increasing concern the past several years that the holiday is becoming more commercialized. Indeed, for those who hold the holiday sacred, it’s jarring to see the extent to which it’s now mass-marketed. The evidence is everywhere. The holiday aisles of Target are stuffed with cheap Day of the Dead crafts during October. Halloween stores sell Day of the Dead costumes....

By Meg Sorg, Clinical Assistant Professor of Nursing, Purdue University The air is getting chillier, pumpkins are perched on porches, and kids across the country are planning their spooky costumes. As a professor of pediatric nursing and a mom to four young children, I know the excitement and anxiety that pandemic holidays bring to children and parents alike. Halloween 2020 brought creative ways to trick or treat while minimizing the spread of infection (candy catapult, anyone?). But scientists have since determined that the risk of transmission of COVID-19 via candy wrappers is low. Still, the extremely contagious delta variant...

By Stanley Stepanic, Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Virginia The vampire is a common image in today’s pop culture, and one that takes many forms: from Alucard, the dashing spawn of Dracula in the PlayStation game “Castlevania: Symphony of the Night” to Edward, the romantic and idealistic lover in the “Twilight” series. In many respects, the vampire of today is far removed from its roots in Eastern European folklore. As a professor of Slavic studies who has taught a course on vampires called “Dracula” for more than a decade, I am always fascinated by the...

By Cascade Tuholske, Postdoctoral Research Scientist, Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN), Columbia Climate School, Columbia University; Chris Funk, Director of the Climate Hazards Center, University of California Santa Barbara; and Kathryn Grace, Associate Professor of Geography, Environment and Society, University of Minnesota Extreme urban heat exposure has dramatically increased since the early 1980s, with the total exposure tripling over the past 35 years. Today, about 1.7 billion people, nearly one-quarter of the global population, live in urban areas where extreme heat exposure has risen, as we show in a new study released October 4, 2021. Most...

By Benjamin Franta, Ph.D. Candidate in History, Stanford University Four years ago, I traveled around America, visiting historical archives. I was looking for documents that might reveal the hidden history of climate change and when the major coal, oil and gas companies became aware of the problem, and what they knew about it. I pored over boxes of papers, thousands of pages. I began to recognize typewriter fonts from the 1960s and ‘70s and marveled at the legibility of past penmanship, and got used to squinting when it was not so clear. What those papers revealed is now changing our...