Author: TheConversation

By Alan Avery-Peck, Kraft-Hiatt Professor in Judaic Studies, College of the Holy Cross Every December Jews celebrate the eight-day festival of Hanukkah, perhaps the best-known and certainly the most visible Jewish holiday. While critics sometimes identify Christmas as promoting the prevalence in America today of what one might refer to as Hanukkah kitsch, this assessment misses the social and theological significance of Hanukkah within Judaism itself. Early history Though it is 2,200 years old, Hanukkah is one of Judaism’s newest holidays, an annual Jewish celebration that does not even appear in the Hebrew Bible. The historical event that is...

By F. Chris Curran, Associate Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy, University of Florida The presence of law enforcement in schools – better known as school resource officers – has become increasingly common. These officers, who have full law enforcement powers, are supposed to keep students safe. Earlier this year, however, a former Michigan school resource officer was convicted and sentenced to one year in jail for doing just the opposite. Instead of protecting students from threats, the officer had been sexually preying on female students, using his power as a school police officer to engage in inappropriate and...

By Jason Loviglio, Chair and Associate Professor of Media and Communication Studies, University of Maryland, Baltimore County From its start half a century ago, National Public Radio heralded a new approach to the sound of radio in the United States. NPR “would speak with many voices and many dialects,” according to “Purposes,” its founding document. Written in 1970, this blueprint rang with emotional immediacy. NPR would go on the air for the first time a year later, on April 20, 1971. NPR is sometimes mocked, perhaps most memorably in a 1998 “Saturday Night Live” sketch starring actor Alec Baldwin,...

By Antino Kim, Assistant Professor of Operations and Decision Technologies, Indiana University, Alan R. Dennis, Professor of Internet Systems, Indiana University; Patricia L. Moravec, Assistant Professor of Information, Risk and Operations Management, University of Texas at Austin; and Randall K. Minas, Associate Professor of Information Technology Management, University of Hawaii Online misinformation has significant real-life consequences, such as measles outbreaks and encouraging racist mass murderers. Online misinformation can have political consequences as well. The problem of disinformation and propaganda misleading social media users was serious in 2016, continued unabated in 2018 and is expected to be even more severe...

By Paige Marta Skiba, Professor of Law, Vanderbilt University; and Caroline Malone, Ph.D. Student in Law and Economics, Vanderbilt University Installment loans seem like a kinder, gentler version of their “predatory” cousin, the payday loan. But for consumers, they may be even more harmful. Use of the installment loan, in which a consumer borrows a lump sum and pays back the principal and interest in a series of regular payments, has grown dramatically since 2013 as regulators began to rein in payday lending. In fact, payday lenders appear to have developed installment loans primarily to evade this increased scrutiny....

By Patricia Illingworth, Senior Fellow, Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University; Professor of Ethics, Northeastern University I teach a course on ethics and philanthropy and have written about how to donate to charities ethically. Recent news about people who make big charitable gifts acting badly is making me wonder whether philanthropy really does make the world better. Think about it: Members of the Sackler family, who have given millions to arts institutions, also own Purdue Pharma. That’s the company that patented and aggressively marketed Oxycontin, an approach that helped bring about the opioid...