The latest victory for college student athletes comes at the cost of elevating bad economic theories espoused by the American right.
The public consensus is clear — college student athletes should be able to make money using their name, image, and likeness (NIL) while participating in NCAA sports. Much like the fight over Obamacare and same-sex marriage, the U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in NCAA vs. Alston aligns with attitudes that had been shifting against the status quo for years.
But the era of NIL has come to represent so much more than a shift in attitudes around student athletes getting paid. It is also the ascension of economic attitudes typically promoted by the American right — namely, deregulation and the…
President Biden has won the approval of voters with legislation that boosts education and childcare funding for working parents. But the GOP hopes the backlash to critical race theory proves voters crave protest politics even more.
In the five months since Democrats took control of the White House and both houses of Congress, critical race theory has been the locus of political agitation for their Republican opponents. At least four states have passed bans targeting the teaching of critical race theory in K-12 public schools, and similar bans have been introduced in at least 20 additional states. …
Once understood to be a critique of society’s overreliance on smart technology, this “Black Mirror” classic turns out to have much more to say about our current fixation with cultural reckonings.
In the third episode of “Black Mirror,” Netflix’s futuristic anthology series about the dangers and unintended consequences of new technology, humans are implanted with a chip that records everything they see, hear, and do. The chip, known as a grain, allows humans to access their recorded memories anytime they wish, and in this episode titled “The Entire History of You,” a young man, Liam (Toby Kebbell), is slowly done in by paranoia over his wife Ffion’s (Jodie Whittaker) past relationship with their friend Jonas (Tom Cullen). …
In the early 2000s, genre-bending in music was all the rage, as artists like Kid Rock and Linkin Park contributed to a record number of chart-topping singles for the rap-rock genre. So why wasn’t Black fusion rock artist Res a part of the success story?
It seems every decade has a group of artists known for taking over the music charts with their genre-bending sound— and in the late 2010s, 19-year old singer and songwriter Billie Eilish was that artist. Mixing darkwave vocals with pop, electronic, and hip-hop beats, Eilish’s sudden popularity harkens back to the Second British Invasion in the 1980s when synth-pop-meets-soul acts like Culture Club, Dead or Alive, and Spandau Ballet traipsed their way into the American mainstream.
What also makes Eilish’s mainstream success so remarkable is her not-so-mainstream appearance. At last year’s Grammys ceremony, Eilish accepted the award for Song of…
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp isn’t playing three-dimensional chess with the state’s new election law. He’s just being a Republican.
Late last month Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed into law a new election bill that would give the Republican-appointed State Election Board unprecedented powers over county election boards and put in place new restrictions on absentee voting, including new photo ID requirements, shorter periods to request an absentee ballot, and fewer drop box locations available to submit absentee ballots.
The new legislation is a direct response to Democrats sweeping the state in national elections last November and in January of this year, even though Kemp spent much of last fall being bullied by former President Trump to overturn Georgia’s results…
Milo Yiannopoulos’ latest con is also a confession that there is no place for queerness in the conservative movement.
Earlier this month conservative activist-in-exile Milo Yiannopoulos announced in an interview with a Christian news site that he no longer identifies as gay and plans to rehabilitate conversion therapy, the debunked practice of “curing” same-sex attraction, by opening a conversion facility in Florida.
The announcement was met with much-deserved derision as Yiannopoulos is a notorious alt-right internet troll and provocateur, having lead the racist online harassment campaign against Black actress Leslie Jones that ended with him getting banned from Twitter. He also made a name for himself touring college campuses to give intentionally incendiary speeches against feminism and antiracism. On…
A complicated mix of privilege, race and gender double standards marks Alexi McCammond’s rise and fall as Teen Vogue’s top editor.
I’ll be honest.
When I first read that former Axios reporter Alexi McCammond had backed out of becoming the next editor-in-chief of Teen Vogue due to past anti-Asian and anti-gay social media posts, I was immediately struck not by her tweets but by how young she was. At 27, McCammond would have been younger than her predecessor, Lindsay Peoples Wagner, who made history as Teen Vogue’s youngest appointed editor-in-chief at the age of 29. And among chief editors at other Condé Nast publications, McCammond would have been the least experienced. Samantha Barry, the current editor-in-chief for Glamour, was an executive…
Once the battleground for anti-affirmative action legal efforts, the University of Texas at Austin is once again confronting white panic over its Black student population.
From Vietnam to Occupy Wall Street, American college campuses have long been at the center of left protest movements. In recent years, however, conservative activists have set their sights on college campuses in an effort to push back against what they see as creeping left-wing authoritarianism in the form of critical race theory and the suppression of conservatives speaking out against it.
This sense of campus political persecution by the right recently found its way into the controversy over “The Eyes of Texas,” the alma mater song of the University of Texas at Austin. According to an investigation by the…
Spotify’s latest plunge into the podcasting world features two giants in American liberalism that don’t quite connect with today’s left.
Last Monday Spotify announced a new podcast series “Renegades: Born in the USA” that features conversations on life, music, and politics between former President Barack Obama and heartland rock superstar Bruce Springsteen. The first two episodes released on the streaming platform introduce Obama and Springsteen’s unusual friendship (the pair met on the campaign trail in 2008 where Springsteen’s song “The Rising” became a rally staple) before diving into a longer discussion about what they see as the central divide in American life — race.
As the series’ name suggests, “Renegades” uses shared feelings of displacement as a framing device for…
The friendships that have meant the most to me in my adult life have tended to be one-sided.
The last time I messaged Adam, there was no reason for me to think it would be the last time I would make an effort to talk to him.
But after a few weeks, when he still hadn’t responded, I decided to remove him as a Facebook friend and delete his number from my cell phone. My reaction to being ghosted by my former coworker, crush, and coveted friend was intentionally dramatic. Instead of just telling myself that I wasn’t going to be the only one making an effort to reach out, I made it next to impossible for me…
Kimberly Joyner
I write about American politics and gender/feminist analysis of TV and film. Based in Atlanta, GA. Email: kimberlyjoyner87@gmail.com
