Machine Learning Misses the Mark on Equality

Robert Williams had just pulled into his Farmington Hills driveway after another long day’s work, relieved to finally spend time with his wife and two daughters. Nothing seemed obviously amiss. But something was very wrong. A police car waiting down the street inched forward, trapping Williams against his own house. Two officers approached, cuffing him […]

Transparent Transphobia: The Fight for LGBT Rights Is Far From Over

The day after President Joe Biden was sworn into office, #BidenErasedWomen trended on Twitter. What had the brand-new president done to women that was so horrible? He signed an executive order to protect LGBT Americans from discrimination. Biden signed several executive orders on his first day in office; most of them reversed Trump-era policies regarding […]

The UN’s Reformation

On the seventy-fifth anniversary of the UN’s formation, Secretary-General António Guterres said that it is “clear that the world has high expectations of us, as the main platform for multilateralism and cooperation on a rules-based international system.” To achieve effective cooperation, the UN Charter sets forth one of the UN’s most important missions as developing […]

Algorithms Are Censoring Us

Image by Ethan Harris Twitter’s ban of former president Donald Trump has sparked a national debate about online censorship. The president’s supporters rallied to his side, asserting that social media platforms should not censor conservatives for holding certain beliefs. From the printing press to Facebook, technology has always molded how society understands freedom of speech, […]

Camus and Kirk: Combating the Right With Political Absurdism

Illustration by The Daily Beast. How does one navigate a world where “alternative facts” abound, evidence and logic can be scorned, and people with immovable opinions live in political echo chambers divorced from reality? In this world, efforts to construct robust and factually supported arguments are mocked and people are far too receptive to bullshit—attempts […]

Abandon Ship: How SAIL Threatens Intrinsic Curiosity

Illustration by Ishita Khanna Curiosity is the lifeblood of academia. It drives us to the classroom to learn and to the laboratory to discover.  At Northeastern, curiosity propels us beyond the boundaries of the lecture halls to develop skills in the real world. Rather than be content with academic knowledge alone, Northeastern students use six-month […]

Debunking Originalism: How Objectivity Promotes Judicial Bias

Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation hearings revived the debate between originalism and living constitutionalism. The former espouses that judges ought to interpret the literal text of the Constitution according to what the words meant when they were promulgated. The latter suggests that the Framers intentionally used loose language to allow for future interpretation, and that […]