I haven’t thought about playing on the Brown High School girls basketball team in decades. But as I was thinking about the controversies surrounding the National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) Women’s Basketball Championship — racism, hood-talk, great...
Commentary
The End of the Latin American Migrant Trope
Myriad films across the history of Latin American cinema explore the trope of the migrant. These films document the trek from Latin America to the U.S. and migrants’ lives afterwards. Classic films such as “Espaldas mojadas” (Alejandro Galindo, 1995) and “El Norte”...
The Migrating Documentary Cinema of Yi Cui
Augmentation is not defined exclusively by emerging digital media forms, software, and interfaces. Instead, augmentation explores how to generate new processes about how to think through, with, and within place that spans the digital, the analog, and the embodied. Not...
Women’s History Month: Latina Invisibility
March is Women’s History Month. It celebrates women's contributions, struggles, blocked opportunities, and ultimate triumphs. It is also a time for issuing empty promises that things will improve, a refrain often heard but only partially fulfilled. For Latinas,...
Jobs Drop Latino Life Expectancy
Work is killing Latinos. Loss of life expectancy due to COVID, especially for marginalized groups, has become a common trope in the mainstream media. The reality for Latinos counters these assumptions. Their life expectancy began declining long before COVID. That...
AI and the Fears of Being Thrown Away: Reflections on a Classroom Incident in Dallas
The day: Monday, February 27, 2023. The place: A large lecture class in the new Engineering and Computer Science West building at the University of Texas-Dallas. It’s a wide space, accommodating 300 students. Great windows and elegant wood window treatments allow for...
Artificial Intelligence, Natural Justice, and Tom Paine’s Unfinished Revolution
Among revolutionary thinkers, Thomas Paine (1737-1809) is one of the most famous. In the current era of robotic automation and artificial intelligence, Paine’s argument for ever-greater sharing of society’s riches is worth thinking about. How can Paine’s writings from...
Teaching the War in Ukraine
It wasn’t long after Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, that I knew I would need to teach a course on it. Six months later, with the war in full force, I launched a semester-long course titled “The Global Politics of the War in Ukraine.” I am an...
Stirring the Ashes of the Burned-Over District
Some of my maternal ancestors were early settlers in South Butler, New York. My great, great, great grandparents, Zenus and Eliza Stone, came to South Butler at some point before 1830 and raised a passel of children there. Zenus is listed on census rolls in those...
Picture the Book: A Photo Essay of a Memoir
The first time I drove on Route 13 in Ithaca, New York, after my mother died, I crept along at the 40 mph minimum speed limit. On the gentle descent into town on that summer’s day in 2016, Cayuga Lake lay in the west as it should. But in front of me, the road’s white...