I’ve been thinking a lot about progress—the idea of progress. How, in America, we are taught to believe progress is inevitable. Our history is presented as a narrative of ever-increasing liberality. The idea being, yes, things were bad in, say, the Antebellum South, but it was all part of the journey to freedom. So goes the rhetoric. And in our history, inconvenient truths that refute this ideal are eclipsed by the larger ideological mission—democracy. Read Full Piece

Local, national and international news are marked today by a fundamental alienation between the parties involved. Evaluate. Think. Understand. These are not simple practices, but in an age marked by snap-deductions and alienating mass-categorizations, they are necessary ones.