Most people learn to count and do basic arithmetic at a young age and don’t give these skills a second thought. But numerosity or numeracy, the ability to think about and use numbers, is more than a basic skill: It is what underlies the human...

Redlining, exclusionary zoning, and predatory lending schemes have put prospective Black homeowners at a severe disadvantage. As the Ballard Center for Social Impact points out, the gap in homeownership rates between Black and white families was larger in 2019 than in the 1960s....

Racism has been embedded in America’s food and agriculture systems since European colonizers began enslaving Black and Indigenous people for farm and plantation labor. A notable example of how this injustice continued throughout history is the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) denial of...

The release of Determined, a new book by renowned Stanford professor of primate behavior and neuroscience Robert M. Sapolsky, has catapulted him into the middle of an ancient debate: whether humans have free will and agency over their actions. Determined isn’t just a bio-philosophical...

Dawn Sydnor Cole, principal at Morrill Math and Science Elementary School in Chicago, has been trying to fill an open position for an art teacher in her school ever since she was first hired to lead the school—six years ago. Why is finding an...

The fossil record of our ape ancestors in Africa is almost nonexistent for a period of about 8 or 9 million years. This long gap lasted from about 16.5 million to 7 to 9 million years ago, during the Miocene geological epoch. ...

Cooperative living might look idyllic on paper, but intentional communities aren’t easy to sustain. It takes a hardy soul to weather all the monetary struggles, power imbalances, compromises with neighbors, and other complications that come with choosing this lifestyle. According to Diana Leafe Christian’s...

“Until now, we haven’t even tried to make big-city school districts work, especially for children of color,” Jhoanna Maldonado said when Our Schools asked her to describe what Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and his supporters have in mind for the public school system of the...

After a decade of struggling with infertility and undergoing IVF procedures, 27-year-old Alaa gave birth to her first son, Kareem—an “energetic and brilliant child” with a “sweet” soul who “filled the house with joy.” Two years later she had another child, Ahmed, nicknamed Moudi, who...

The economic realities in the U.S. do not generally support working-class artists and culture bearers—an issue that has only been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. According to a March 2021 report titled “Solidarity Not Charity: Arts and Culture Grantmaking in the Solidarity...