Human evolution was driven by early humans’ ability to be clever and humorous, the “survival of the wittiest.” The analysis argues that the earliest stages of grammar provided a platform for verbal competition and sexual selection, gradually replacing physical violence with verbal agility.
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Lithium-ion batteries keep catching fire in Toronto. Here's why they are so dangerous
Fires can be more aggressive based on how charged the battery is, which firefighters often have no way of knowing. The batteries can explode and become projectiles while crews are responding. And Toronto Fire has had to expand its decontamination process to get carcinogens off its gear, because the standard protocol isn’t good enough.
Black Women's Reproductive Lives as Unruly Resistance to Capitalist Empi...
In this wide-ranging conversation, Takiyah (T.D.) Harper-Shipman joins us to discuss her new book Unruly Fertility: Race, Development, and Decolonial Reproductive Politics (Stanford University Press, 2026). The discussion traces how modern states—from North Carolina to Senegal—have historically sutured Black women's fertility to the shifting demands of capitalist accumulation, deploying reproductive health policies not as benevolent care but as instruments of crisis management and labor control.
Harper-Shipman unpacks the colonial origins of "womanhood" itself as a racialized labor category constructed during European enclosures, one that has always excluded Black women from its aspirational promises of citizenship, consumption, and reproductive autonomy. Drawing on Federici, Mies, Spillers, and Angela Davis, she argues that Black women enter the modern political economy as producers of workers—never citizens—and that contemporary feminist movements risk replicating white womanhood's assumptions when they abandon class analysis or ignore the chains of production behind their demands.
The conversation also examines the recent closure of USAID, an institution Takiyah describes as fundamentally about the preservation of white life and the extension of U.S. empire. Rather than mourn its end, she urges us to seize this rupture and continue dismantling the colonial infrastructure of reproductive governance it represented. The conversation closes with a powerful critique of the epistemic violence embedded in global family planning campaigns—how metrics like "unmet need" were designed to serve supplier interests, not Black women's desires, and how Black women's embodied knowledge about contraceptive side effects is systematically dismissed as myth while dangerous technologies banned in the Global North are actively promoted across Africa.
Throughout, we explore the Americanization of Black political identity from World War II through 9/11 to Obama's presidency, tracing how Black people have been conscripted into U.S. imperial projects through strategic moments of violence and national belonging. This is Part 1 of a two-part conversation; additional questions will be addressed in an August follow-up.
T.D. Harper-Shipman is an Associate Professor and Chair of Africana Studies at Davidson College in North Carolina. She teaches courses and publishes on political economy and its intersection with race and gender in Africa. She has published in p Antipode, Oxford Academic, Third World Quarterly, and International Studies Review, among other places. She is an academic editor at Third World Quarterly and forum editor with the Miami Institute of Social Sciences. Her first book, Rethinking Ownership of Development in Africa was published with Routledge Press in 2019. She has also published in public-facing forums including Africa is a Country and the Global African Worker.
Reckoning with Empire: Defiant Scholarship with Takiyah Harper-Shipman: https://globalsouth.org/2026/06/recko...
La femme fait la maison: The Accumulation of Surplus Value through Family Planning in Burkina Faso: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/f...
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Debating Right Wingers on TikTok (Live from 08/23/2026)
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How Trump's tariffs work to redistribute wealth up the food chain
Though nominally aimed at making foreign "cheaters" pay, the U.S. president's tariffs have in fact been a powerful domestic mechanism for taking money from poor and middle-class Americans and giving it to large corporations that have been adept at playing the system — one that's heavily influenced by lobbying and political donations.
Canada’s Socialists Are Coming for City Hall — Inspired in part by Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York City, a new crop of socialist candidates is campaigning for municipal power across Canada.
Hasanabi Reacts The Next China Shock Is Here | The Ezra Klein Show
Hasanabi Reacts The Next China Shock Is Here | The Ezra Klein Show
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Canada’s Socialists Are Coming for City Hall — Inspired in part by Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York City, a new crop of socialist candidates is campaigning for municipal power across Canada.
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How listening to music can 'significantly impair' creativity. The popular view that music enhances creativity has been challenged by researchers who say it has the opposite effect.
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"Woke 1" and Democratic Party Deceit | Black Agenda Report
The democrats’ backtracking on what they dismissively refer to as “wokeness” is the newest iteration of their political trickery as once again they give the appearance of supporting what they actually oppose. They serve the interests of the oligarchs, and not those of the people.
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