| Slave or Enslaved Person? |
[19 May 2015|02:29pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_history_of_american_slavery/2015/05/historians_debate_whether_to_use_the_term_slave_or_enslaved_person.html Should the historian’s first responsibility be passively representing the past, or actively seeking to right its wrongs, even if in some small way? Academics are divided over whether to use the term slave or enslaved person to describe black victims of institutionalized forced labor in the United States. The debate has even spilled from the windows of the ivory tower, with a Straight Dope poll inviting respondents to weigh in on the harsh single word versus the multipart “circumlocution.” (Bondsperson has emerged as a distant third contender.) It may seem like a meaningless exercise in semantics, ancillary to the system’s central sin. But larger questions crowd close.
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| The Long Road Home |
[19 May 2015|03:15pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2015/05/autonomous_cars_and_the_future_of_the_commute.html Speculation about the autonomous car—when it will become available to consumers, how it will affect the way we live, what it will mean for auto ownership—is so widespread that it's now almost a journalistic genre unto itself. There's good reason for all this conjecture: The jump from human- to software-controlled driving represents not the typical, incremental improvement to the automobile that accrues with every passing model year, but rather a massive, qualitative change in the way we get around.
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| Caution Flag |
[19 May 2015|08:23pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2015/05/indy_500_crashes_james_hinchcliffe_s_indianapolis_500_crash_shows_organizers.html On Monday during a practice session for Sunday’s Indianapolis 500, IndyCar driver James Hinchcliffe suffered a horrific crash that landed him in surgery for an injured leg. Hinchcliffe’s Honda hit a wall, spun out, and then overturned on its head, before bouncing back onto its wheels. What made Hinchcliffe’s crash unusual was that it was the fourth such crash during practice and qualifying sessions at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in less than a week. In that period, the thing Indy cars hardly ever do—turn into helicopters on impact with the wall and flip like dollar pancakes—happened four times.
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