Category: Current Events
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Black History Month
Black History Month started at a Chicago festival celebrating the 50th anniversary of the emancipation of enslaved people. Carter Woodson observed this festival, and opened up a Black history booth during the 3 week duration of the celebration. Soon after the festival ended, he decided to form the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (Now changed to Association for the Study of African American Life and History).
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AI, Racism, and Society
In a fiery spoken-word piece performed by Joy Buolamwini, she asks artificial intelligence a simple question: “Often forgetting to deal with// Gender, race, and class, again I ask Ain’t I a Woman?” This sentiment rings true as visuals play of multiple high profile black women, such as Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey, and Serena Williams, being misidentified by various facial recognition software. The AI jumps to the conclusion that they are all men. This situation is evidence of underlying racial bias, and it’s not an isolated incident; racial bias is persistent in AI. WRITTEN BY: Lucy Damachi
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Growing up with the Internet
Gen-Z is a generation that is utterly obsessed with our phones and screens. We are a part of a generation that was born into the unknown and pushed into the abyss of the internet. Our developing years were spent having to choose between living in the moment and getting lost in our technology. We turned out fine though, right?
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Why Mental Health Issues Disproportionately Affect the LGBTQIA+ Community
4.5% of adults in the US identify as LGBTQIA+ as of 2017. 39% of those people suffer from mental health issues – that is 5.8 million people. It is really important to know that identifying as LGBTQIA+ is NOT a mental illness or disorder. Everyone has a sexual orientation and gender identity. People who identify differently than the majority of the population fall under the term LGBTQIA+. Although being LGBTQIA+ is absolutely not a mental illness, more LGBTQIA+ people experience mental health problems than their “straight” counterparts. This is mostly due to the shame, fear, discimination, and traumatic events they have to face due to how they identify. Discrimination against LGBTQ+ persons has been associated with high rates of psychiatric disorders, substance abuse, and suicide. Many people who identify as LGBTQIA+ are also part of other marginalized communities. This adds the potential for xenophobia, racism, ableism, ageism, sexism, and much more to homophobia or transphobia they already have to face. WRITTEN BY: Eliza Cline
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Let’s Talk About: Gaming
Video games have been around since 1958, and as the years go by with improved technology, playing video games has become a very popular hobby or leisure activity amongst everybody, no matter the age or generation. As of October 2020, there have been 3.07 billion active video gamers worldwide on many different platforms such as computers, consoles, mobile phones, TVs and others. WRITTEN BY: Emily Yeap
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Intersectionality in Activism: The Need to Support Black Transgender People
Social movements are increasingly realizing the importance of intersectionality – the understanding that every person’s different identities (their race, gender, class, sexuality, etc.) work together to define their unique experience in society. Until the importance of intersectionality was acknowledged, activists believed that a win for a marginalized group meant a win for everyone in that group, regardless of their other identities that might work against them gaining equal benefits. However, despite increasingly intersectional discourse, even current social movements fail to include all identities successfully. WRITTEN BY: Elisabeth Mahilini Hoole
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The Entertainment Industry During COVID-19
2020 was a wild year for a lot of us. With staying home, going nuts over toilet paper, and having holidays, if any, alone, we’ve seen a lot of changes in the way we go by our daily life. The global pandemic has impacted people, companies, and industries differently. For example, the Entertainment Industry of music, literature, art, drama, film, etc., has been wrestling with ideas of how to go on. There are people whose weekly income relies on in-person entertainment work, such as drama professors, stage directors, or piano teachers. Forms of art are difficult to teach on an online platform. It takes discussion, representation, and practice to get an artwork right. When you’re online, all of these qualities are harder to grasp, and it takes more out of you to believe in the magic of art you are pursuing. When you’re focusing on staying safe more than anything, where does entertainment become relevant?
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Have you Heard of Eco-Anxiety?
Whether you have heard of “eco-anxiety” or not, chances are you have experienced it at one point or another. Although many are still denying that climate change exists, the media is bombarding us with the latest climate atrocities from the burning of the Amazon rainforest to the growing plastic crisis. This information takes a toll on people’s mental health. This entry focuses on explaining the background, meaning, and ramifications of eco-anxiety.
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More than Just Meat: Lab-Grown Meat is a Game Changer.
Agriculture today is a modernized relic of the practices of the earliest humans. We’ve grown crops and raised livestock since the dawn of time, but is it also possible to grow meat? Lab-grown meat, also known as clean meat, is the product of animal flesh through a process known as vitro cultivation — the growth of cells and tissues in a controlled environment. The process begins by collecting myosatellite cell samples from the animal and it is from there that the selected samples are placed within an environment with the necessary nutrients and growth elements that are naturally present in animals. =
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Our Detachment from Reality
From a worldwide pandemic to explosions to forest fires and even murder hornets- 2020 has been a pretty rough year. And it’s only October! Many people believe that the tragedies that occurred in 2020 were the product of what is known as the “2020 curse,” a series of freak events that are birthed from extremely bad luck. This notion covers up the true actuality of why so many disastrous occurrences took place in 2020, many were the outcome of several years of background harm all happening to boil over at the same time. Even so, most of the world has been at home in quarantine throughout some part of 2020. WRITTEN BY: Prerna Kulkarni
ZENERATIONS 