Project 2025 compels local prosecutors to enforce extreme right-wing laws

  Project 2025 is an authoritarian playbook to systematically dismantle the checks and balances framework upon which American democracy is built. Specifically, Project 2025 calls for the U.S. Department of Justice to “initiate action against local officials—including District Attorneys—who deny American citizens the ‘equal protection of the laws’ by refusing to prosecute criminal offenses in their jurisdictions.”

The last execution

  One day Alabama will conduct its final execution.

  The witnesses present won’t know that, of course. If capital punishment disappears, it will be by law or ruling that comes after these men and women gather in the small, tomb-like room at Atmore Correctional Facility.

Voting rights at risk after Supreme Court makes it harder to challenge racial gerrymandering

  Two recent Supreme Court rulings on congressional redistricting will have starkly different consequences for Black voters in the 2024 election.

  One ruling boosted Black voting power in Louisiana, while another decision upheld a South Carolina congressional map that the lower court had declared “illegal racial gerrymandering.”

  Despite these seemingly contradictory outcomes, there is a through line.

How Trump’s appeal to nostalgia deliberately evokes America’s more-racist, more-sexist past

  There’s a reason Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign is working hard to evoke nostalgia: People who are nostalgic – meaning, people who long for America’s “good old days” – were more likely to vote for Republican candidates in the 2022 midterm elections, according to research I conducted along with collaborators Kirby Goidel and Paul Kellstedt.

Why is Congress filled with old people?

  It’s not just presidential candidates who are old.

  Based on my own data, nearly 20% of House and Senate members are 70 or older, compared with about 6% who are under 40.

  Voters in North Dakota recently approved a ballot initiative that would place an upper age limit on candidates for Congress from that state. If it survives likely court challenges, the law would bar anyone 81 or older from serving in Congress from North Dakota. The motivation behind such a measure: to correct that major generational imbalance in Congress.

Unregulated online political ads pose a threat to democracy

  Think back to the last time you scrolled through your social media feed and encountered a political ad that perfectly aligned with your views – or perhaps one that outraged you. Could you tell if it was from a legitimate campaign, a shadowy political action committee, or even a foreign entity? Could you discern who paid for the ad? Chances are, you couldn’t.

Righteousness is revealed in conduct, not rhetoric

  It’s hard to look at the world and some of the people who seem to get ahead without occasionally asking ourselves why we should be ethical. However normal it is to think like this, the question should be off limits for people who profess strong religious beliefs. After all, what religion does not mandate morality?

College may not be the ‘great equalizer’ − luck and hiring practices also play a role, a sociologist explains

  The idea that a college degree levels the playing field for students of different socioeconomic classes has been bolstered in recent years. Research from 2011 and 2017, for example, found that earning a bachelor’s degree helped students from less advantaged backgrounds do as well as their better-off peers.

  Jessi Streib, a sociology professor at Duke University, was skeptical. According to other research, everything associated with landing a good job – professional networks, high GPAs, internships, status symbols – is unequally distributed by class. To find out whether college is the “great equalizer,” or whether more is at play than a bachelor’s degree, Streib interviewed 62 students at a public university who were majoring in business – the most popular major. She also chatted with 80 hiring agents and formally interviewed many more employers. Here, she shares her findings.

Extreme heat waves broiling the US in 2024 aren’t normal: How climate change is heating up weather around the world

  Less than a month into summer 2024, the vast majority of the U.S. population has already experienced an extreme heat wave. Millions of people were under heat warnings across the western U.S. in early July or sweating through humid heat in the East.

  Death Valley hit a dangerous 129 degrees Fahrenheit (53.9 C) on July 7, a day after a motorcyclist died from heat exposure there. Las Vegas broke its all-time heat record at 120 F (48.9 C). In California, days of over-100-degree heat in large parts of the state dried out the landscape, fueling wildfires. Oregon reported several suspected heat deaths.

Managing Alabama’s school funding problems isn’t fixing them

  There’s a pamphlet in the Alabama Department of Archives and History written by Booker T. Washington. It’s called “How To Build Up A Good School in the South” and dates from the first decade of the 20th century.

  Washington was trying to address a practical problem for Black Alabamians: how to keep their schools open. Because Alabama’s Jim Crow government had segregated the system and was doing all it could to destroy Black education.