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The Supreme Court and the Ongoing Debate About Originalism

Angelo Franco

It is this same argumentative viewpoint of legality and fairness that originalists use to call into question the Roe v. Wade decision. It’s why there are still lawsuits making their way up to the Supreme Court that seek to overturn Obergefell and Roe v. Wade. And this is a slippery slope because in its quest to “limit” judicial power, originalism places the burden of slow progress in the hands of the people while erroneously assuming that everyone has equal representation in Congress.

The Art of Virtual Travel: A Sordid History of the Rocking Chair

Hunter Dukes

While moral and spiritual comfort arrived in English through Anglo-Norman, our sense of comfortable as being physically content, relaxed and reclined, appears in the late 18th century. Soon after, a type of French easy chair, the confortable, became popular at home and abroad. What made it cozy? The systematic use of springs, hidden beneath inflated upholstery. In the 1800s, it was still possible for J.C. Loudon to claim that “the effect of spiral springs as stuffing has been long known to men of science; but so little to upholsterers, that a patent for using them in stuffing was taken out, some years ago, as a new invention.”

The Business of Matching Vietnamese Brides With Chinese Men

Wei Li

In Vietnam, where women experience significant social pressure both to marry and to support their families financially, China is seen as a rich country with great professional opportunities. Vietnamese women may advertise with a marriage broker because marrying a Chinese man seems likely to check off all those boxes. South Korea is also seeing a growing share of Vietnamese wives. Online marriage brokers do not always provide these woman with accurate information about their clients, my research finds.

Can the Spread of Violent Crime Be Prevented?

Samira Shackle

Violence interrupters use numerous techniques, some borrowed from cognitive behavioral therapy. Cole reels them off. “Constructive shadowing”, which means echoing people’s words back to them; “babysitting,” which is simply staying with someone until they have cooled down; and emphasizing consequences. “A lot of kids don’t know where their next meal is coming from, their mother’s getting high,” says Cole. “People say everything is common sense. No. Sense is not common to a lot of people.”

The Modern Presidency: Wherefore Art Thou, American Legislature?

Adam Gravano

A flashpoint of this contention has been the executive order. Most notably, President Obama's statement that “I've got a pen and I've got a phone,” which covered more than actions requiring the secrecy and dispatch that other areas in which the presidency is accorded a freer hand, namely foreign policy: “Helping to make sure our kids are getting the best education possible, making sure that our businesses are getting the kind of support and help they need to grow and advance, to make sure that people are getting the skills that they need to get those jobs that our businesses are creating.”

How the Super Bowl Evolved From Football Game to Entertainment Extravaganza

Peter M. Hopsicker and Mark Dyerson

The NFL’s strategic marriage to television has also diverted attention away from the game on the field. In 1967, advertising rates for a 30-second commercial spot cost a modest $42,500. In the years since, they’ve escalated to become the most expensive advertising time in the history of television. After 1985, in response to the huge impact of Apple’s legendary “1984” commercial, advertising rates soared to over $500,000 for a 30-second spot. This trend sparked the emergence of the “Ad Bowl,” an unofficial but hyper-intense marketing competition to produce the most creative and memorable television commercial targeting the Super Bowl’s enormous captive audience.

The Ebenezer Baptist Church Has Been a Seat of Black Power for Generations

Jason Oliver Evans

From the pulpit of Ebenezer, King preached some of his more memorable sermons. In one of his sermons published in a collection titled The Strength to Love, King describes racial prejudice as indicative of “softmindedness,” a person’s tendency to uncritically adhere to unsupportable beliefs. In the same sermon, titled “A Tough Mind and a Tender Heart,” King argued, “Race prejudice is based on groundless fears, suspicions, and misunderstandings.”

Should the U.S. Enforce Stricter Libel Laws?

Angelo Franco

It wasn’t until the celebrated landmark case, New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, of 1964 that completely redefined libel laws nationally. The case came up against the backdrop of the civil rights movement, when in 1960 the Times published an editorial ad sponsored by the Committee to Defend Martin Luther King Jr., which included details of brutality and abuses that Black students suffered at the hands of the police, particularly in Montgomery, Alabama. L.B. Sullivan, Montgomery’s police commissioner, sued the Times for defamation and demanded a retraction even though he was not mentioned by name.

We Believed Our Constitution Would Always Protect Us - Until It Didn’t

Wolfgang Mack

To sum up, some of the compromises that our Founding Fathers had to make may have been necessary at the time they formulated our Constitution but the reasons for these compromises simply no longer exist. As recent events have shown, these obsolete compromise provisions can be exploited by less-than-trustworthy politicians to undermine our democratic institutions -- a clear and present danger to the future of our republic.

The Uncertain Heavens: Christiaan Huygens’s Ideas of Extraterrestrial Life

Hugh Aldersey-Williams

Huygens then turned his attention to intelligence and technology. His planetary beings would surely have science, and especially astronomy, as this study was said to have arisen as a consequence of the fear of eclipses, which would also occur on other planets. They would doubtless have some of our inventions, “yet that they should have all of them is not credible.” In particular, Huygens could not credit that they would possess telescopes, since he considered those which he had used himself as being so fine that other intelligences would not be able to equal them. Instead, he invested the denizens of the planets with far superior natural eyesight.

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