The Conversation

Detroit's recovery: The glass is half-full at most

Written by Laura A. Reese, Professor of Political Science and Director, Global Urban Studies Program, Michigan State University

Empty field north of downtown Detroit, photographed nine months before the city declared bankruptcy in 2013AP Photo/Carlos Osorio, File

After decades of demographic and economic decline, culminating in America’s largest municipal bankruptcy in 2013, many observers were ready to proclaim that the city of Detroit was dead. But over the past...

Exploiting black labor after the abolition of slavery

Written by Kathy Roberts Forde, Chair, Associate Professor, Journalism Department, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Convicts leased to harvest timber in Florida around 1915

The U.S. criminal justice system is riven by racial disparity.

The Obama administration pursued a plan to reform it. An entire news organization, The Marshall Project, was launched in late 2014 to cover it. Organizations like Black Lives Matter and The Sentencing Project are dedicated to...

Staying politically neutral is more dangerous for companies than you think

Written by Daniel Korschun, Associate Professor of Marketing, Drexel University

President Donald Trump’s executive order temporarily banning immigration from seven Muslim countries has put corporate executives in a bind. Almost from the moment he announced the ban, questions poured in about where those executives stood on the issue.

The media have highlighted a cluster of companies that have made public statements...

What Trump misses about regulations: They produce benefits as well as costs

Written by Joseph Aldy, Associate Professor of Public Policy, Harvard University

Shutterstock.com

President Trump jettisoned more than 30 years of bipartisan regulatory policy on January 30 when he issued an executive order on “Reducing Regulation and Controlling Regulatory Costs.” The order requires that whenever a new regulation is enacted by any federal agency, regulators must eliminate two rules, so that the...

Does an anomaly in the Earth's magnetic field portend a coming pole reversal?

Written by John Tarduno, Professor of Geophysics, University of Rochester

What's north would become south.NASA , CC BY

The Earth is blanketed by a magnetic field. It’s what makes compasses point north, and protects our atmosphere from continual bombardment from space by charged particles such as protons. Without a magnetic field, our atmosphere would slowly be stripped away by harmful radiation, and life would...

Uncovering the roots of racist ideas in America

Written by Ibram X. Kendi, Assistant Professor of History, University of Florida

Little Rock protest, 1959 Wikimedia/John T. Bledsoe

Donald Trump proclaimed during his inaugural address, “When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice.”

Opening our hearts to patriotism will not solve the problem of racist ideas. Some of the nation’s proudest patriots have also been the nation’s...

Why do conservatives want the government to defund the arts?

Written by Aaron D. Knochel, Assistant Professor of Art Education, Pennsylvania State University

What happens when funding isn't just eroded, but is wiped away?'Erosion' via www.shutterstock.com

Recent reports indicate that Trump administration officials have circulated plans to defund the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA), putting this agency on the chopping block – again.

Conservatives have sought to eliminate the NEA since the...

Stories are better than lectures at teaching us about health

Written by Sheila Murphy, Professor of Communication , University of Southern California, Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism

Narratives about health can help change behavior.Girl watching TV via www.shutterstock.com

Humans having been using stories or narratives to transmit crucial information for thousands of years. Despite that, Western medicine largely ignores the use of narrative and instead continues to rely on lists of dos and don’t’s, facts and figures...

Finding the causes of cancer is the first step to prevention

Written by Richard G. "Bugs" Stevens, Professor, School of Medicine, University of Connecticut

Cigarette smoke is a known carcinogen. Women smoking image via www.shutterstock.com.

Big Tobacco is the poster child for how an industry can confuse the experts and the public on the dangers of its product. It delayed any smoking restrictions for decades by employing the subterfuge of demanding “perfect knowledge” for proof of harm....

Understanding genetic differences between breast cancer tumors is key to better treatment

Written by Jonathan Rennhack, Ph.D. Student, Michigan State University

There are genetic difference within and between tumors. DNA sequencing image via www.shutterstock.com.

Breast cancer is not a single disease. It is in fact, a collection of genetic changes that all lead to the same outcome: a tumor in the breast.

This means that breast cancer patients can’t be treated with identical therapies. Instead,...