University of Michigan freshman Reem Al-Khatib was asked to appear in a video supporting the #UMDivest resolution in the student government council. The resolution called for the University’s Board of Regents to create a committee to investigate three companies operating in Israel and involved in alleged human rights violations against Palestinians. The video was pretty innocuous, with her complete statement being, “I’m a Palestinian freshman.

The hair-on-fire emergency in the quaggy swamplands of Florida Man’s brain these days isn’t COVID-19—it’s the ghastly thought that somewhere within the sea-buffeted borders of America’s enormous schwanzstucker, a sports-baller might get gruesomely Theismanned without hearing a musical tribute to our nation first.

There are few people in modern political history who have done as much damage to our democracy as Newt Gingrich. As the prototypical, ideological Republican “bomb-thrower” who first came of age during the Reagan “revolution” in the 1990s, Gingrich ushered in and patented an era of hyperpartisan viciousness and crass, unrelenting political rancor that finally reached its apotheosis in a GOP now firmly under the thumb of Donald Trump.

Union membership as a percentage of all U.S. workers dropped from 10.8% to 10.3% in 2021, returning to its 2019 level. The bump in 2020 is instructive, since it came because, in the mass job loss of the pandemic, more nonunion workers lost their jobs. But the lousy numbers for union membership are also important to understand in the context of popular opinion and U.S. labor law.

Hello, Friday folks! This week has been sad-face, angry-face, consternation emoji! The Democratic Party—with no help from the Republican Party, of course—is unable to protect the voting rights of Americans. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema has virtually no friends other than Mitch McConnell and John Kennedy, and those two guys don’t keep friends.

The  singer, actor, and performer Meat Loaf passed away late Thursday night, according to a post made by his family on his Facebook page. No official cause has been given. The popular performer had a tough run of health problems over the last few years, but he was working on new material and touring since the the fall. According to an unconfirmed report from TMZ, the singer had canceled a “business dinner” earlier this week after catching COVID.

During and after the Jan. 6 insurrection, before Fox News went all-in on greasing the skids for fascism, some of its most celebrated on-air personalities acted as though Donald Trump had been hit with a protoplasmic growth ray and was rampaging from sea to rising sea popping whole Taco Bell Expresses in his mouth like Fiddle Faddle.

At this point in the pandemic, everyone should be in agreement that face masks need to be worn when inside (at minimum) and that they need to fit well. Obviously depending on the age and needs of the person involved, that’s sometimes easier said than done. One Pennsylvania community is lashing out from both sides of the political aisle after a photo of a teacher and minor student was posted to a Facebook page called “North Penn Stronger Together.