By a vote of 220-204 on Apr. 1, the House of Representatives voted in favor of the decriminalization of marijuana at the federal level. The Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement Act (MORE) is set to include a multitude of changes for buyers and sellers alike,…
On Apr. 1, Amazon center employee Chris Smalls—and the rest of the Staten Island JFK8 Amazon warehouse—won a landmark victory for labor rights, starting the first Amazon labor union. The implications here are tremendous, and if the wave of Starbucks unions in the past year…
The Florida-raised Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson has dominated the news cycle as of late, with several Republican politicians spending their time during her hearings trying to show off by accusing her of not knowing what a woman is, being a proponent of critical race theory…
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has, in the past few years, gone from an otherwise irrelevant local politician to the golden boy of the far-right. Seemingly a shoe-in for the Republican presidential candidate, DeSantis has been lifted up to the national stage recently, and his most…
The Sunshine Protection Act has emerged with the aim to eliminate the one hour time change—Daylight Savings Time—once and for all. The objectives of the bill are to make the time change either permanently sprung forward or fallen back, and to repeal Section 3 of…
In 2020, when COVID-19 began to spread across the country and quickly took control of the popular consciousness, it became associated with two things: masks and New York City. New York was, in the first six months of the pandemic, easily the hardest hit location…
Since 1973, American women have had the constitutional right under federal law to seek an abortion within 24 weeks of pregnancy. Recently, the U.S. Supreme Court heard a case in Mississippi—known as Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Clinic—where the Republican majority favored shortening the period…
A striking paper published by the Johns Hopkins Institute has been making the rounds, once again heaving the cultural-political trenches erected around COVID-19 into disorder and galvanizing yet another round of controversy. The paper in question, A literature Review and Meta-analysis of the effects of lockdowns…
This brief serves as an update on last semester’s feature on manatees and their alarming mortality rate. Since November, local advocacy groups are rushing to expand the public’s knowledge and to increase awareness. Manatees are essential to Florida’s unique aquatic ecosystem: they act characteristically as…
On Jan. 10, approximately two weeks before Holocaust Memorial day, the McMinn Country School Board in Tennessee unanimously voted to ban Art Speigelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus. As part of what some have identified as a larger effort to censor books dealing with critical…
