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Should Biden Cancel Student Debt?Economics offers only part of the answer. The rest depends on whether you think higher education is an investment or a public good.

Whenever I think about student loan debt, one of the first things I think about — besides my own — is a 2018 essay by my colleague M.H. Miller. As one of the 45 million Americans who collectively owe $1.71 trillion for student loans, Mr. Miller wrote about what it is like to have debt — more than $100,000 worth in his case — become the organizing principle of your life, to be incapacitated by it, suspended, at age 30, “in a state of perpetual childishness.”

The economic injustice argument tends to invite a lot of debate about how best to tailor cancellation to those who are suffering most from the crisis, which isn’t always the same thing as who has the largest student loan balance. That’s because student debt, in dollar terms, is concentrated among people who make more money and tend to be much better able to make their monthly payments than borrowers who owe relatively small amounts.Here’s a chart from Matt Bruenig at the People’s Policy Project that shows the spread:Editors’ PicksWhere Is Hollywood When Broadway Needs It?75 Artists, 7 Questions, One

Beth Moore, a popular evangelical Christian and Bible teacher, says she is no longer a Southern Baptist and is parting ways with the denomination's publishing arm.

"I am still a Baptist, but I can no longer identify with Southern Baptists," she told the news agency. "I love so many Southern Baptist people, so many Southern Baptist churches, but I don't identify with some of the things in our heritage that haven't remained in the past."

The Southern Baptist Convention is the largest Protestant denomination in the US.

Discoveries at Sanxingdui have totally transformed our understanding of how multiple, regionally distinct yet interrelated early cultures intertwined to produce what came to be understood as “Chinese” civilization.

Why is there such a gap in the attention paid in the West to the Egyptian archaeology, as opposed to Chinese archaeology — given that each is important to our understanding of human history?

Stories of Western archaeologists competing to find tombs in the 19th century riveted Western Europeans, and today’s news coverage is a product of that imperialist tradition

NPR Short Wave host and reporter Emily Kwong is a third generation Chinese American, but she's never spoken her family's language.

At age 30, she's trying to learn the language for the first time, and unpacking why she never learned it in the first place.

Emily's father, Christopher Kwong, stopped speaking his first language — Mandarin Chinese — when he was five-years-old. Born in New York City in 1958, he struggled to communicate with his kindergarten teacher and classmates.

It’s shameful that a mob fringe has even come for Abraham Lincoln. His statue was torn down by extremists in Portland last fall.

Washington State has chosen to immortalize Billy Frank Jr., a Native American truth-teller, genuine hero and role model, who died in 2014, at the U.S. Capitol in the National Statuary Hall Collection.

Replacing the statue of Marcus Whitman, an inept Protestant missionary who tried to Christianize the natives, with a Native American who was arrested more than 50 times for practicing his treaty rights to fish for salmon is a karmic boomerang.

The Guantánamo story may finally be coming to an end, and as the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks approaches, the question is who will write the last chapter, the White House or the Supreme Court?

President Biden has vowed to close the island detention center, through which nearly 800 detainees have passed since it opened in early 2002 to house some of the “worst of the worst,” in the words of the Pentagon at the time

President Barack Obama also wanted to close Guantánamo but couldn’t manage to do it. Circumstances are different now

During the four years that Caligula occupied the Roman throne, his favorite hideaway was an imperial pleasure garden called Horti Lamiani, the Mar-a-Lago of its day. The vast residential compound spread out on the Esquiline Hill, one of the seven hills on which the city was originally built, in the area around the current Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II.

There, just on the edge of the city, villas, shrines and banquet halls were set in carefully constructed “natural” landscapes. An early version of a wildlife park, the Horti Lamiani featured orchards, fountains, terraces, a bath house adorned with precious colored marble from all over the Mediterranean, and exotic animals, some of which were used, as in the Colosseum, for private circus games.

Historians have long believed that the remains of the lavish houses and parkland would never be recovered. But this spring, Italy’s Ministry of Cultural Heritage, Cultural Activities and Tourism will open the Nymphaeum Museum of Piazza Vittorio, a subterranean gallery that will showcase a section of the imperial garden that was unearthed during an excavation from 2006 to 2015. The dig, carried out beneath the rubble of a condemned 19th-century apartment complex, yielded gems, coins, ceramics, jewelry, pottery, cameo glass, a theater mask, seeds of plants such as citron, apricot and acacia that had been imported from Asia, and bones of peacocks, deer, lions, bears and ostriches.

President Trump formed the 18-member commission — which includes no professional historians but a number of conservative activists, politicians and intellectuals — in the heat of his re-election campaign in September, as he cast himself as a defender of traditional American heritage against “radical” liberals.

The commission’s report charges, in terms quickly derided by many mainstream historians, that Americans are being indoctrinated with a false critique of the nation’s founding and identity, including the role of slavery in its history.

“Historical revisionism that tramples honest scholarship and historical truth, shames Americans by highlighting only the sins of their ancestors, and teaches claims of systemic racism that can only be eliminated by more discrimination, is an ideology intended to manipulate opinions more than educate minds,” the report says.

I was dismissive of the Anthropocene, a proposed new epoch of Earth history that has long since escaped its geoscience origins to become a dimly defined buzzword and, as such (I argued), serves to inflate humanity’s eventual geological legacy to those unfamiliar with deep time.

Wing is on the Anthropocene Working Group, a group of scientists working to define just such an epoch. He hated my essay. In his manner, though, he was extremely nice about it.

the essence of a lot of Faulkner is, before you can be something new and different, slavery is always there, the legacy of slavery is not erased, ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past,’

The history and archaeology of Mongolia, most famously the sites associated with the largest land empire in the history of the world under Ghengis Khan, are of global importance.

Climate change and looting may seem to be unrelated issues. But deteriorating climate and environmental conditions result in decreased grazing potential and loss of profits for the region’s many nomadic herders.

For Mongolians, these remains are the lasting reminders of their ancient past and a physical tie to their priceless cultural heritage.

Prince Turki Al-Faisal, a former Saudi intelligence chief and an influential royal family member, told U.S. lawmakers to get off their “high moralistic horses” as ties between the historical allies remain frayed a year after the murder of columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

Prince Turki criticized congressional representatives on Wednesday for the “horror” and “disdain” they express for Saudi Arabia, saying U.S. lawmakers are unable to perform their jobs to address “issues of racism and racial inequality” and to reform gun ownership laws.

The murder last year of Khashoggi, a U.S resident and Washington Post columnist, as well as the long-running war and humanitarian crisis in Yemen and the detention of Saudi female activists have all strained the kingdom’s relations with much of the Washington establishment outside the White House.

Harry Harris, Washington's envoy to South Korea, has been subjected to heated vitriol on social media and by anonymous netizens for his mustache. That small piece of facial hair has, as Harris put it, "for some reason become a point of some fascination here in the media."

But Harris' 'stache has sparked discussions on topics much bigger than the ambassador himself: the still-raw emotions among many Koreans about the legacy of Japanese occupation; the prevalence of racism in such a homogenous society; and cracks appearing in the future of the decades-old alliance between Seoul and Washington as the two sides attempt to reach a deal on how to cover the cost of US troops stationed in South Korea, amid reports that President Donald Trump demanded a 400% pay increase.

The gist of the criticism is that with the mustache, Harris resembles the reviled Japanese leaders who ruled the Korean Peninsula with an iron fist during the Japanese occupation. Some of Japan's most prominent wartime leaders -- like Hideki Tojo, the Prime Minister who was later executed by a postwar tribunal, and Emperor Hirohito -- had mustaches.

The consequences were swift. Over the next two days, Ms. Groves was removed from the university’s cheer team. She then withdrew from the school under pressure from admissions officials, who told her they had received hundreds of emails and phone calls from outraged alumni, students and the public.

Ms. Groves was among many incoming freshmen across the country whose admissions offers were revoked by at least a dozen universities after videos emerged on social media of them using racist language.

In one sense, the public shaming of Ms. Groves underscores the power of social media to hold people of all ages accountable, with consequences at times including harassment and both online and real-world “cancellation.”

President-elect Joe Biden's inaugural committee on Sunday announced there would be a virtual parade after the swearing-in ceremony on Inauguration Day as part of efforts to keep crowds to a minimum amid the coronavirus pandemic.

"The parade will celebrate America's heroes, highlight Americans from all walks of life in different states and regions, and reflect on the diversity, heritage, and resilience of the country as we begin a new American era," the inaugural committee said in the release. The committee said it would announce participants in the coming weeks.

"Pass in Reviews are a long-standing military tradition that reflect the peaceful transfer of power to a new Commander-in-Chief, during which the President-elect, hosted by the Commander of Joint Task Force-National Capital Region, will review the readiness of military troops.

Although she's not a household name in the United States, billionaire Luiza Trajano, the richest woman in Brazil, might very well become one soon if her radical new model to confront structural racism takes hold.

Its coveted trainee program, long considered a major stepping stone into Brazil's corporate world, will now only admit Black Brazilians into its ranks in an effort to upend a system that oftentimes sidelines Brazilians of African heritage from rising up the corporate ladder.

The Magalu announcement quickly reverberated across the Brazilian media landscape. It was a bold move, no doubt, but not one without blowback; there have been calls across social media for a boycott of the company's stores.

At the time, however, my editors told me that it wasn’t acceptable to use the word “lie” when writing about presidential candidates.

By now, though, most informed observers have, I think, finally decided that it’s OK to report the fact that Donald Trump lies constantly.

. But the president has closed out this year’s campaign with two huge, dangerous lies — and there’s every reason to fear that this week he will roll out a third big lie, perhaps even more dangerous than the first two.

The sheer volume of conspiracy theories — including QAnon — and deceptive claims are already playing a role in stunting Biden’s growth with Latino voters, who make up about 17 percent of the state’s electorate.

“It’s difficult to measure the effect exactly, but the polling sort of shows it and in focus groups it shows up, with people deeply questioning the Democrats, and referring to the ‘deep state’ in particular — that there’s a real conspiracy against the president from the inside,” he said. “There’s a strain in our political culture that’s accustomed to conspiracy theories, a culture that’s accustomed to coup d'etats.”

Florida’s Latino community is a diverse mix of people with roots across Latin America. There’s a large population of Republican-leaning Cubans in Miami-Dade and a growing number of Democratic-leaning voters with Puerto Rican, Colombian, Nicaraguan, Dominican and Venezuelan heritage in Miami and elsewhere in the state. Many register as independents but typically vote Democratic

Poverty and poor health in black communities – the reason why African Americans have died from Covid-19 at three times the rate of white people – also contributed to rage. But the problem goes deeper: the falsification of history.

That falsification is especially galling to Americans because, unlike most countries, the United States was built on a set of ideals.

The cruelty that reigned between the end of the civil war and the beginning of the civil rights movement, when racial terror was not only the rule but the law, was veiled by the obfuscating name “Jim Crow”

tightening presidential

crucial swing state

often divided almost exactly in half

6-year-old Nathaniel Julies, was of mixed heritage, or, as it is still known, colored, a vestige of apartheid-era South Africa’s racial classification.

Death at the hands of the police in South Africa is hardly uncommon — by one estimate, each day a South African dies in a police action.

The authorities initially tried to suggest that Nathaniel had been shot during an exchange of gunfire between police officers and gang members. But within days of the killing, they charged the three officers.