Society & Culture

The twenty-first century tourist can get a bad rap: it’s easy to conjure images of loud-mouthed Americans clad in sneakers and Hawaiian shirts, snapping photos of the Colosseum with bedazzled iPhones. Is it possible to be a traveler in the world today? These The Common pieces seek an answer.

Are machine translation softwares the future of language or is a machine never capable of translating language’s nuances? In this piece, translator and language professor Mickey Hong seeks an answer.

China, with its population of 1.35 billion and annual box office revenues for Hollywood predicted to reach $5 billion USD in 2017, is worth watching—here’s a list of view-worthy films as recommended by academia’s top Chinese film expert, USC Professor Stan Rosen.

What do a physicist, a Victorian, and a civil rights activist have in common? Before they were heroes, saints, and cultural icons, they were deeply flawed human beings.

At the core of the #icebucketchallenge’s mission is the role social media plays in raising awareness and funds for positive causes. But is social media an effective campaign mechanism? Is true awareness really garnered from these efforts or are these dead-end challenges?

The immediacy and horror of a tragedy like the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 raises expected questions: Who were the victims? Who were the perpetrators? What are the immediate policy responses? But, as awful an incident as this clearly is, the downing of the flight is just an episode in the larger Ukrainian conflict.