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The Sun Interview
Standards of Care
Rolonda Donelson on Bias and Anti-Science Attitudes in Medicine
The reason Black women were used to develop the field of gynecology was because they were no more than property. They weren’t seen as people; they were just seen as things. The controlling of Black women’s bodies started with chattel slavery, but it continues today.
June 2026
Ancestors
Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah on the Musical and Cultural Legacy of New Orleans
Some African harmonic traditions and histories may have been redacted, but they’re not lost. In New Orleans, specifically among the tribes, they made sure to hold on to those histories and the skeleton keys of those expressions.
May 2026
Lesson Plan
Pranav Jani on Free Speech and College Activism
The Right and I agree on the potential of universities as a space in which students develop ideas that can transform the world. The difference is, they want to stamp it out, and I want to encourage it.
April 2026
Persons of Interest
Sean Vanatta on the Unchecked Rise of the Credit Industry
The idea that a certain kind of people are worthy of credit is entirely a social construct based around an idealized vision of society. Those same people who got credit also got all the other benefits of living in postwar America.
March 2026
The Fourth Estate
Sheila Coronel on the Future of News Media
I don’t believe we’re confined to the media business models that we know. As the information landscape evolves, there will still be journalism about what is happening now, and that will help people in the future who are trying to make sense of it. This work has value.
February 2026
Crop to Cup
Phyllis Johnson on Coffee's Colonial Roots
Many of the coffee-producing countries still operate as if they are under the rule of a colonizer. You’ve got this country that was ruled from the outside as a production mechanism for the good of other countries, right? And once they gain their freedom, things aren’t going to immediately start working out well, because now they’ve got to develop their own political systems.
January 2026
Glass Overfull
William Rees on Humanity’s Ecological Overshoot
There has been a boom, and soon there will be a bust, in global human population. And no advanced civilization will be able to reemerge because we will have used everything up. There will be no oil and gas and other supplies of that nature to maintain any civilization that might emerge from the ashes of this one.
December 2025
The Golden Door
John Washington on the Case for Open Borders
Our nation’s founders attained political power by invading this land, killing most of the people who were already living in it, stealing large swaths of land from other countries, and then saying, “This is ours, and no one else can come in.” It’s hard to defend that moral claim.
November 2025
Radar and Revelation
Jeffrey J. Kripal on Archiving the Impossible
I don’t interpret UFO phenomena literally. I can’t help but see the moral anxiety and end-of-the-world panic expressed by them. But that doesn’t mean I think these encounters don’t happen.
October 2025
Airborne
Seema Lakdawala on Viruses and How They Spread
Studies done with animals in labs don’t totally replicate the way humans get infected, which involves mucus, saliva, and other pathogens. We don’t know the full complexity of that interaction.
September 2025
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