The Black Panther Party and the “Undying Love for the People”

Flint Taylor In These Times
Recounts the short, complicated history of the Black Panther Party. Using remarkable black-and-white archival footage, the current voices of more than twenty former Panthers, a former FBI agent, several retired police officers, a number of Panther lawyers and community activists, and a collection of historians and accompanied by some soul stirring period music, the lessons to those engaged in today’s struggles against racism and for justice are there for all to see.

The Woman Who Stared at Wasps

Veronique Greenwood Quantum Magazine
Cooperative colonies — ants, termites, and some wasps and bees — have fascinated scientists for more than a century because they pose an evolutionary conundrum. Only a very small number of insects actually get to reproduce: the queens and their mates. The rest give up their chance to contribute to the gene pool, caring for the offspring of others instead. How did this lifestyle, known as eusociality, evolve?

An Insidious Way to Underrepresent Minorities

Gary D. Bass & Adrien Schless-Meier The American Prospect
Cuts in U.S. Census funding threaten to produce an undercount of minorities and the poor and to reduce their share of federal aid.

The Part of “Illegal” They Don’t Understand

David L. Wilson Monthly Review
Congress’s 1965 decision to limit immigration from Latin America and the Caribbean coincided with an increase in that immigration—largely, as a result of U.S. policies, including support for vicious dictatorships in many countries, the funding of civil wars in Central America, and the promotion of neoliberal economic programs throughout the region. The result is our current undocumented population of about 11.7 million, including some 8 million workers.

The Indonesian Massacre: What Did the U.S. Know?

Margaret Scott The New York Review of Books
President Obama welcomed Indonesian President Joko Widodo to the White House last week, 50 years after the U.S. backed military coup that resulted in the killings of hundreds of thousands of suspected Indonesian Communists and just weeks after the CIA’s declassification of intelligence documents offers an opportunity to revisit the U.S role in those murderous events. But neither president appears ready to probe further one of the worst massacres since World War II.

The Mesa Verde Mystery

Seven centuries ago, an entire society performed one of the greatest vanishing acts in human history when they fled their homes in the American Southwest. Archaeologists are trying to work out why they left.