Author: Insights

THE STATE OF MILWAUKEE: As a city, Milwaukee stands at the crossroads, where shifting policies, economic pressures, and community efforts are shaping the future of the city’s neighborhoods, businesses, and public services. This feature reviews one of those interconnected and evolving challenges affecting local residents today. Following Mayor Cavalier Johnson’s State of the City 2025 Address on March 3, this article is part of a series that explores everything from policing and public safety to healthcare, education, housing, business, infrastructure, and environmental changes. It also highlights the tension between progress and persistent disparities, focusing on policy decisions, economic realities,...

THE STATE OF MILWAUKEE: As a city, Milwaukee stands at the crossroads, where shifting policies, economic pressures, and community efforts are shaping the future of the city’s neighborhoods, businesses, and public services. This feature reviews one of those interconnected and evolving challenges affecting local residents today. Following Mayor Cavalier Johnson’s State of the City 2025 Address on March 3, this article is part of a series that explores everything from policing and public safety to healthcare, education, housing, business, infrastructure, and environmental changes. It also highlights the tension between progress and persistent disparities, focusing on policy decisions, economic realities,...

The world has watched Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s actions in Ukraine with a mixture of alarm and déjà vu. Moscow has a history of looking enviously upon its neighbors. Just as the Czars of old harbored visions of an ever-expanding empire, and used their military might to seize, colonize, and absorb lands that were once sovereign, Putin has long sought a revival of those imperial dreams. The dictator’s brand of nationalism, wrapped in historical revisionism and lies, has painted Ukraine as an inseparable part of Russia’s spiritual, cultural, and political heritage. The propaganda has ignored the fact that Ukrainians...

In the early 2000s, if someone were to mention online gaming, the average American might have pictured teenagers sitting in living rooms, gripping plastic controllers, and shouting into their headsets. It was easy to dismiss such behavior as harmless, where young gamers practiced their trash talk in the privacy of their own homes. Few recognized that a nasty undercurrent of sexism, racism, and homophobia was developing in those spaces. Fewer still could have predicted that, decades later, some of the same voices would evolve into a powerful current of political hate, fueling an entire army of trolls committed to...