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Forget Pickleball—Retired Japanese Gangsters Embrace Softball

Like the rest of Japanese society, the Yakuza are aging, making a transition out of criminal careers a challenge. Forming a softball team—and changing the uniform colors from black to pink and gray—helped some. 

Amateur History Sleuths Decode Letters from Mary Queen of Scots

57 coded letters held by the French national library were mistakenly identified as Italian. A team of codebreakers found they were the prison correspondence of the ill-fated cousin of Queen Elizabeth I. 

It's Up to McCarthy to Remove Statues of Slavers from the Capitol

A third of the artworks in the Capitol depict slaveholders. Whether they're replaced with other works, possibly those celebrating liberators, is largely up to the new House Speaker. 

Nashville's Historic Woolworth Building is in Trouble

America faces a choice between preserving the sites of its civil rights history within the evolving fabric of cities and towns, or erecting more plaques explaining what happened in the buildings that used to be there.

NYPL to Take Archives of East Village Eye, Newspaper of 1980s Downtown Scene

The complexity and difficulty of placing the relatively small archive of an underground arts paper with a repository that can preserve it highlights the challenges facing historic preservation. 

Is a Third Intifada Imminent?

by Daniel Byman

The second intifada, between 2000 and 2005, ended not with negotiated peace but with an overwhelming application of force by Israel on Gaza and the West Bank. As Israeli politics tilts rightward and abandons the idea of a negotiated settlement, it is unclear what will prevent a new escalation of violence. 

Madeline Kripke Built an Immense—and Bawdy—Dictionary Collection

One woman's passion for collecting has been an invaluable resource for studies of the evolution of slang, profanity and vulgarisms; after her recent death, an epic quest to preserve the collection ensued. 

DeSantis's War on Universities Goes Beyond the Influential "Powell Memo"

by Len Gutkin

Although the future Supreme Court Justice did lay out a plan to contest ideological control over universities, Chamber of Commerce attorney Lewis Powell was concerned above all with the power of big business to dominate society without opposition or criticism. 

Irony Alert: GOP Stages Anti-Socialist Show Vote while Preparing to Convene in the Most Socialist City in America

by John Nichols

"When the House denounced “the horrors of socialism,” those legislators made the case that socialism was—and is—a part of what makes Milwaukee great."

Don't Like Where Society's Heading? Blame Palo Alto

by Scott W. Stern

Journalist Malcolm Harris attempts to excavate the history of how a worldview shaped by the tech industry—most notably its rampant individualism and subordination of the self to surveillance, metrics and monitoring—conquered the world, while also keeping the flames of unregulated capitalism and eugenics burning. 

8 Sites Illuminating African American History Show the Need for Preservation

The National Trust for Historic Preservation is working against time and redevelopment to prevent the loss of key sites of African American history across the nation. So far the project has helped protect a museum of the Buffalo Soldiers, Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church, and Louis Armstrong's house in Queens, among other sites. 

Will Midwest Governors Challenge Florida's Conservative Education Agenda?

Governors J.B. Pritzker and Gretchen Whitmer are hardly beacons of "wokeness" – but they may be key advocates of a political message to parents and teachers that their party will protect the freedom to learn. 

The Past Isn't Even Past, Especially in Florida

by Diane Roberts

"I plan to carry on teaching the way I always have, resisting the state’s decrees. The point of education is to produce not just pliant cogs but thinking citizens with knowledge of the rich and expansive ways to be human. That is genuine freedom."

How "Jabroni" Became a Mainstream Insult

Long before Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson made the term part of his ring persona, the term had worked its way from Sicilian immigrants to the subcultures of criminals, carnies and con artists and the shop-talk of wrestlers.

The Case for Blondie as the Sound of the 70s

by Kevin Dettmar

While the decade's pop scene was undeniably eclectic, there's an argument to be made that the New York group was at the center of the most lasting trends of the 1970s. 

I'm a Florida Teacher. This is What's Happened to My Classroom Library

"We have been told that this is a temporary move as the district works toward compliance with this law, but with only one person to vet thousands of books, it doesn’t feel very temporary."

UNC Trustees Sidestep Faculty to Launch "School of Civic Life and Leadership"

Faculty believe, based on statements by politically appointed Trustees, that the school will be a landing place for appointing conservative scholars to the campus without typical shared governance. 

New Graphic Fiction Asks: What if January 6 Had Succeeded?

Harvard Law professor Alan Jenkins collaborated with a group of artists and writers to explore what might have happened if a mob attacking the Capitol had made a right turn instead of a left. 

Exhibition: Church of England's Links to Slavery

The exhibition is an acknowledgment of the church's investments in the transatlantic slave trade, but critics argue that the church remains obligated to pay reparations. 

Florida's Higher Ed Policy Push Gets Bigger

by Francie Diep and Emma Pettit

Tenure, diversity and equity programming, and the diversion of resources to favored programs devoted to "the actual philosophy which shaped Western civilization" are among the features of the state's higher ed agenda.