Society & Culture

As a medical student, I'm perpetually absorbing knowledge taught to me...What all of these teachings share is a certainty that there are problems, and that medical students can learn – through lectures and textbooks and research – how to fix them. I'm still not clear why we're making the attribution of one thing as a problem, and another as the solution.

This piece is published in partnership with China Focus, a student run blog sponsored by the 21st Century China Program at UC San Diego. You asked; New Yorker China correspondent Evan Osnos...

In national politics these days it sometimes seems as if we re-litigate battles won decades ago, and at times I wonder whether those 20 or 30 years younger than I even know what happened back in the day. So here are some snippets. Although specific to my time at Brown University, similar things happened in the same time frame at institutions of higher education all over the country. So, dear reader, yes, DO generalize.

The U.S. Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments in a pregnancy discrimination suit, Young v. UPS. The case provides a good occasion to reexamine the history of family-leave policies in the U.S. We’ve made progress, but we have a long way to go.

In the same way Christmas festivities have waxed and waned, new religious holidays have been created, higlighting the diversity of American traditions and inhabitants.

As business leaders and politicians alike have proclaimed, this may be China’s century. Which is why we at Hippo have invited American journalist Evan Osnos, who witnessed China’s transformation firsthand as The New Yorker’s China Correspondent, to be our next Ask Me Anything guest.

It’s true that the 71-day occupation of Wounded Knee—probably the longest civil disorder in U.S. history since the Civil War—brought national attention to the oppression of Indian people. But Wounded Knee 1973 did not end the oppression. A new film by Kevin McKiernan, an NPR journalist who defied an embargo to get inside, could shed new light on what happened during the conflict.