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9/11 was an inside job. Aliens have already made contact. COVID-19 was created in a lab. Maybe you rolled your eyes at some point while reading that list. Or maybe you paused on one and thought… well… it could be true. Since the first Americans started chatting online, conspiracy theories have become mainstream — and […]
Scott Olson/Getty Images/Scott Olson/Getty Images Scott Olson/Getty Images/Scott Olson/Getty Images Airline workers — pilots, flight attendants, mechanics, baggage handlers, and more — represent a huge cross-section of the country. And for decades, they’ve used their unions to fight not just for better working conditions, but for civil rights, charting a course that leads right up […]
What does it mean to do the greatest good for the greatest number? When the Los Angeles Aqueduct opened in 1913, it rerouted the Owens River from its natural path through an Eastern California valley hundreds of miles south to LA, enabling a dusty town to grow into a global city. But of course, there […]
Ethan Miller/Getty Images Ethan Miller/Getty Images The Third Amendment. Maybe you’ve heard it as part of a punchline. It’s the one about quartering troops — two words you probably haven’t heard side by side since about the late 1700s. At first glance, it might not seem super relevant to modern life. But in fact, the […]
Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images The Fourteenth Amendment. Of all the amendments to the U.S. Constitution, the 14th is a big one. It’s shaped all of our lives, whether we realize it or not: Roe v. Wade, Brown v. Board of Education, Bush v. Gore, plus other Supreme Court cases […]
The Sixth Amendment. Most of us take it for granted that if we’re ever in court and we can’t afford a lawyer, the court will provide one for us. And in fact, the right to an attorney is written into the Constitution’s sixth amendment. But for most of U.S. history, it was more of a […]
In 1966, the governing body of the Olympic track and field event started mandatory examinations of all women athletes. These inspections would come to be known as “nude parades,” and if you were a woman who refused the test, you couldn’t compete. We’re going back almost a century to the first time women were allowed […]
Marc Piscotty/Getty Images Marc Piscotty/Getty Images The Second Amendment. In April 1938, an Oklahoma bank robber was arrested for carrying an unregistered sawed-off shotgun across state lines. The robber, Jack Miller, put forward a novel defense: that a law banning him from carrying that gun violated his Second Amendment rights. For most of U.S. history, […]
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images The First Amendment. Book bans, disinformation, the wild world of the internet. Free speech debates are all around us. What were the Founding Fathers thinking when they created the First Amendment, and how have the words they wrote in the 18th century been stretched and shaped to fit a […]
Sudan has been at the center of a deadly and brutal war for over a year. It’s the site of the world’s largest hunger crisis, and the world’s largest displacement crisis. On the surface, it’s a story about two warring generals vying for power – the latest in a long cycle of power struggles that […]