AI has been used in romance, in education and in politics for better or for worse. Its impact on the environment and policy have made a number of headlines, but it has also integrated itself in everyday tasks and human interaction from sourcing recipes to crafting the perfectly written email. AI has increased the power of the powerful and given those with less power the illusion of power.
Read MoreI did not arrive at this conclusion through theory. I arrived at it in a fourth-grade classroom, watching how easily history bends in front of children trained to trust the adult speaking. That moment did not feel dramatic at the time. It felt ordinary, which is precisely what made it dangerous.
My daughter’s class was reading Across the Alley, a children’s book about a Black boy and a Jewish boy growing up in 1940s Brooklyn and learning to cross the prejudices their families carry. It is the kind of curriculum I want for my children because it teaches friendship across differences and insists racism is constructed, not natural. The lesson was working. The room was quiet in the way classrooms get when children are listening seriously.
Read MoreEmpires do not fall quietly. They fracture. They grow erratic. They lash out. As legitimacy erodes, violence increases, not because the people are suddenly more dangerous, but because power is losing its grip. America in 2025–2026 is not experiencing random instability; it is living through the predictable convulsions of an empire in decline.
Read MoreTina Strawn lives in Costa Rica. She’s an early riser, which makes our long-distance meetings easier to schedule. My afternoon is dark and humid; her morning is bright with sun. Her house is about an hour from the coast, and I can almost see the warmth through the computer screen. It reminds me that the humid heat of the tropics feels like a mother’s embrace
Read MoreLast month, early on a Saturday morning, I volunteered at a food distribution in Brooklyn.
My body protested that I stayed in bed, but my mind was triumphant, and I made my way out the door. By the time I arrived at Fulton Plaza around 10 a.m., the air was frigid. The 14 degrees were sharp enough to make me question why I am still living in New York. I expected to be among the first to arrive. Instead, I was surprised to find several volunteers already there.
Read MoreI have had the pleasure of running a lifestyle brand that creates and sells clothing and other merchandise rooted in thoughtfulness, social consciousness, and the lived pains and experiences of marginalized people. And it might be because of this that I encounter myself in a paradox.
I’m writing today from a place I never seek out, but one that finds me anyway, just often enough to sting every time. That place is seller’s remorse. Like the first bite into a fresh grapefruit, the tangy sweetness is followed by the unavoidable bitterness.
Read MoreTrump has been clear about setting his eyes on Greenland. With the melting of its ice caps and its strategic positioning, Greenland has become an increasingly attractive objective for the US president.
In AHUS’ January 12 publication, Zinthia Álvarez Palomino spoke about the toppling of the Venezuelan government and argued, “it enables a more rigorous analysis of how sovereignty, justice, and legitimacy are unevenly distributed across global power relations rooted in the historical subordination of Abya Yala, especially to the United States.”
Read MoreRecognizing that United States intervention in Venezuela responds to a colonial logic does not deny in any way the profound harm, the pain, suffering, killings, or violence inflicted by the Maduro regime, nor does it invalidate the other feelings that emerged after the “apparent removal” of that regime or imply defending its continuation in power. Rather, it enables a more rigorous analysis of how sovereignty, justice, and legitimacy are unevenly distributed across global power relations rooted in the historical subordination of Abya Yala, especially to the United States.
Discrediting those of us who raise these concerns by labeling us naïve, “red,” or dreamers, while simultaneously claiming that only U.S. military intervention could have brought about the fall of the Maduro regime, reproduces what thinkers like Aníbal Quijano and Frantz Fanon described as the coloniality of being. This reasoning once again frames us as subordinated bodies, incapable of self-determination and in need of outside intervention, discipline, and correction.
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