In her new book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, feminist philosopher Judith Butler explains how gender and sex are socially constructed, while fighting critics who see gender as a threat to the social order.
There is also a long history of using paedophilia and ideas about child grooming in homophobic and transphobic ways to oppose the recognition of the civil rights of LGBTIQA people.
Nebraska Cornhuskers mascot Herbie Husker pumps up the crowd during a 2015 football game.
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History shows there is no magic bullet for solving gang crime. Only an evidence-based approach, coupled with mutually agreed targets and indicators, will start to achieve real change.
A truck with migrants crossing the Sahara from Niger in 2009.
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Fears that TikTok is “serving up” drug content to impressionable users have prompted calls for all drug content to be censored on the platform. But that would remove useful health advice too.
People display Qanon messages on cardboards during a political rally in Bucharest, Romania on Aug. 10, 2020.
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The QAnon conspiracy movement is the latest in a long line of moral panics that emerge as a response to change. False theories are used to undermine claims to social justice raised by marginalized groups.
Are cats really to blame for the worldwide loss of biodiversity?
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Framing cats as responsible for declines in biodiversity is based on faulty scientific logic and fails to account for the real culprit – human activity.
Matthew Tomlinson’s diary is full of insights into Georgian England.
Wakefield Library
Somewhere between the early Buddhist times and today, worries about game addiction have given way to scientific understanding of the benefits of play, rather than its detriments.
A new study suggests LGB teachers in rural schools far likelier to have depression or anxiety than those in towns or cities.
‘Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!’ was a funky, lighthearted alternative to the action cartoons that, for years, had dominated Saturday morning lineups.
GeekDad
Demands for regulation of media violence reached a fever pitch after RFK’s assassination, and networks scrambled to insert more kid-friendly fare into their lineups. Enter: the Mystery Machine.
Some say the hysteria over screen time echoes parents’ worries that their kids were watching too much TV in the 1980s. But new studies show there’s nothing overblown about parents’ growing concern.
Nitrous oxide has been used as an anaesthetic for over 100 years.
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Media-driven panic about drugs can create a perception more people are using the drug than they actually are, and when teens think ‘everyone’ is doing it, they are more likely to want to do it too.
Are these people suffering from a disorder – or just having fun?
AP Photo/Kamil Zihnioglu
Lindsay Grace, American University School of Communication
Just because people enjoy a recreational activity doesn’t mean they’re addicted to it, even if they spend lots of time doing it.
In 2016, a UK Home Affairs Committee report highlighted that street-based sex work has diminished significantly over the last two to three decades.
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Consensual sex work, like non-commercial sex, mostly happens behind closed doors. Yet stigma toward and ignorance about sex workers makes people panic when we try to talk about reform.
Should children under the age of 13 be given access to smartphones?
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Teaching fear and avoidance of technology may protect people from negative consequences. But it also prevents them from finding, and benefiting from, productive uses of new innovations.