To Assemble
Timeless stories from our 173-year archive handpicked to add context to the news of the day.
Camped Out On Campus: Colleges Call Cops on Student Protesters
[ J U L Y • 1 9 3 4 ]
“The university has no right to immunity from social judgment…Here freedom of thought and expression must flourish undisturbed.”
Read “The University in a Time of Change” by James Rowland Angell, 16th President of Yale University
[ F E B R U A R Y • 1 9 3 2 ]
“A university president of the American type is an undesirable feature in academic life…Also, he has to raise money; and the presence of a notorious socialist among his faculty may easily be an undesirable hindrance to that end.”
Read “The American College President” by Harold Joseph Laski
Immunity and Impunity
[ A U G U S T • 2 0 1 1 ]
Objections from the Nixon Foundation: “‘Payoffs’ is a pejorative and ambiguous term not usually associated with Watergate.”
Read “All the Publicist’s Men”
[ S E P T E M B E R • 2 0 0 5 ]
How right-wing judges are transforming the Constitution.
Read “Fighting for the Supreme Court” by Cass R. Sunstein
[ J A N U A R Y • 2 0 1 9 ]
“The Constitution the Founders stuck us with was never really intended to serve as the unifying document of a large and splendidly varied people. It was, instead, a wary alliance among white men of property, intent on spreading their power over a continent.”
Read “The Crisis of Our Constitution” by Kevin Baker
Got Milk? Traces of Bird Flu Found in Grocery Stores
[ O C T O B E R • 1 9 9 4 ]
Milking it in Vermont.
Read ”How Now, Drugged Cow?” by Tony Hiss
[ A U G U S T • 1 9 9 1 ]
John Berger joins the herd.
Read “The Named and the Celestial”
[ J A N U A R Y • 1 9 4 0 ]
“Then came the vast outburst of 1918 which showed what influenza can do on a truly global scale...In the present state of international and economic affairs one cannot but wonder what pestilence we may get from another world war–or as the aftermath of a prolonged period of mass anxiety.”
Read “The Problem of Influenza” by George W. Gray
Planet vs. Plastics
[ D E C E M B E R • 1 9 7 3 ]
Consider garbage.
Read “The Waste of the Future”
[ A U G U S T • 1 9 9 1 ]
From the “Crisis Management Plan for the Clorox Company.”
[ M A Y • 2 0 1 4 ]
Daniel Smith traces the origins of today’s mass extinction.