In 1962, novelist William Melvin Kelley provided “a hip assist” to white New York Times readers by translating the black slang term “woke” as “well-informed, up-to-date.” Four decades later, singer-rapper-songwriter Erykah Badu revealed through her song “Master Teacher” that she “stay[s] woke,” and implored her audience to do the same. The early 2010s saw the […]
The paradox of tolerance, first outlined by Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper, explains that the attractive glitter of universal tolerance may not actually be gold. The paradox suggests that if a society is truly tolerant of everything then it must also be tolerant of intolerance, introducing a slippery slope that could eventually see intolerance completely supplanting
There’s a reason cut-and-dried contests between good and evil occur more frequently in fairytales than reality. Such fantasies aren’t subject to humanity’s “absolute chaos of differences” that Hannah Arendt wrote political bodies seek to find common threads in. This chaos rarely allows for situations in which the good guys are always good and the bad
Natives and outsiders alike know that Boston stands unrivaled as the most hated sports city in the country and arguably the world. Why? Simple: their teams are too good. The respective twenty-seven and seventeen championship victories of the widely maligned New York Yankees and Los Angeles Lakers, for example, have inspired envy and ire in
When I was first taught to memorize and recite the Pledge of Allegiance, I neither knew what “pledge” nor “allegiance” meant. They were empty, formless words, meaningful to me only because they appeared meaningful to my teacher and my classmates. It’s worth noting (as humbly as possible, I promise) that I always outpaced those classmates
