Technology plays a vital role in our society day-to-day, but what exactly is our role when it comes to managing our tech? How do our internal biases impact the products we create? Can technological advances actually be “neutral” as a product of human imagination? These are all questions to consider as we take a look at how human and computational infrastructures overlap.

The gay bar has long since been a locale of sexual expression, community, and most importantly, identity. If the gay bar was what Atherton Lin describes as, “a place where we hoped we could find ourselves,” what does it mean for queer identity when the spaces that once shaped and defined it are steadily vanishing in urban centers worldwide?

More American residents are behind bars than any other nation. While the US Criminal Justice System was established to regulate peace and order, it has since become the catalyst for criminalizing people of color. Fueled by initiatives like Nixon’s “War on Drugs” campaign, which unfairly targeted communities of color, mass incarceration has steadily been on the rise. Despite the staggering amount of people behind bars, the crime rates haven’t exactly been on the decline, raising the question: do prisons actually keep us safe?

The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution has roots in strong firearm regulation and gun safety policy, but over the years, it’s become a mantra for gun rights advocates.

The first amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees that everyone has the right to practice his or her own religion or no religion at all. A similar guarantee exists in Canada under its Charter of Rights and Freedoms. However, this right to religious freedom hasn’t necessarily been assured for practitioners of traditional African religions throughout history in North America.

There are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations in the United States today, nearly three million people, but their stories have largely been omitted from the nation’s history.

Throughout the world, democratic progress has not only halted, but receded over the past few years and the United States has been one of the main perpetrators.

We’ve completed our second season of UnTextbooked! Our team of young producers have done phenomenal work exploring topics and questions that really matter, including episodes about the War on Terror, Native American boarding schools, population control, and much more.

The Cold War was a decades-long military conflict that dominated geopolitics in the latter half of the 20th century. And as Americans, we often see it framed as a binary conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union; one that ended around the time the Berlin Wall came down in 1989.

The United States is still reckoning with its history of racism. For a century after slavery ended, US businesses, banks, schools, and neighborhoods were segregated by race. It took a series of Supreme Court cases and acts of Congress to legally ban discrimination based on race, but discrimination isn’t just a switch that can be turned from “on” to “off.” The legacy of these unfair laws still affect Black Americans today.

There is a fundamental duality in how Asian Americans are perceived in our country. They’ve at times been held up as the “model minority”, affirming this idea that the American Dream is alive and well if only immigrants could work harder. At other times they’ve been regarded as threatening and perpetually foreign. A recent example of this is the dramatic rise in anti-Asian violence in the wake of the covid-19 pandemic.

American food is unlike anything else in the world. And it goes a lot deeper than hamburgers and pizza. The thing that makes American food special is the stunning variety of options and how accessible it is to the average consumer. Also some regional American dishes that are impossible to find anywhere else on the planet

It’s no secret that society will eventually have to transition away from fossil fuels. Some governments and businesses think the answer is biofuels,like ethanol. Ethanol is a type of alcohol—the same type of alcohol that humans have been producing for millenia. And so, in much of the world, the techniques to produce ethanol are already known and exploited. All it takes is the fermentation of sugary crop, like potatoes, corn, or sugarcane. The result is a clear liquid fuel that can power engines, similar to gasoline.

For centuries, Iran had a strict social hierarchy that prevented women—particularly upper class women—from participating in public life. This started to change in the early 20th century when Iranians became disillusioned with the ruling class and had a constitutional revolution. This new constitution established a parliament, public schools, and also opened the door for women to start asserting their own rights to education and employment.

There’s a lot of evidence that America is more divided than ever. Our politics, media, and ideologies are so polarized that it puts a stress on our unity as a country. But Dr. Denis Lacorne says that, in spite of that tension, America’s strength comes from our nation’s commitment to tolerance. The trick is figuring out the balance of tolerating the intolerant.

The Founders of the United States envisioned the presidency as an office that would be minimal in reach. They didn’t want the USA to be a monarchy.

Thousands of protestors joined Indigenous activists at Standing Rock to fight for clean drinking water. At its core, this fight echoes the legacy of broken treaties and settler industrialization. Producer Lily Sones talks with Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes) about how industrialization halted traditional indigenous food ways and how extractive industries cause health effects across today’s indigenous communities.

The Greek poet Archilochus said “a fox knows many things, a hedgehog knows one big thing.”

This phrase inspired a famous essay by a 20th century philosopher named Isaiah Berlin, who said that pretty much all people can be categorized as either “foxes” or “hedgehogs”. Foxes tend to be agile and perceptive, whereas hedgehogs tend to be resolute and hyper-focused on their end goal.