In The News: College of Liberal Arts

No major voting issues have been reported in Nevada since early voting began Saturday, but the potential for voter intimidation and incited violence remains a real threat to the election process, a new report warns.
Sirius XM | Top of Mind with Julie Rose: There’s a lot of questions about what impact video games have on people. But there’s a positive new trend: some video games are starting to portray deep and vulnerable male friendships. In the video game Final Fantasy XV there is a lot of emotional connection between characters. You wouldn’t expect that kind of emotional friendship from a video game, right?
Sirius XM | Top of Mind with Julie Rose: The Senate Judiciary Committee will vote on Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court nomination on Thursday. The vote is expected to go in her favor there, and in the Senate. Senator Lindsey Graham predicted that in his opening speech, before we ever even heard from Judge Barrett. So if the hearings aren’t for senators to figure out how they want to vote, then what are they for?
ACCORDING TO PIERS MITCHELL, A paleopathologist from the University of Cambridge, scientists have been extracting data from ancient human poop for over a century. “In the past, we’ve been able to look at a single coprolite from a single person”—that is to say, a preserved turd—”and study the microbiome of that one individual.” (The microbiome is the complex collection of microbes living in every animal’s digestive tract.) Now, in a newly released paper in Philosophical Transactions B, Mitchell and co-authors Susanna Sabin and Kirsten I. Bos have blown the lid off of single-turd analysis: by analyzing two medieval latrines’ worth of number two.
A pandemic is arguably not the optimal time to make theater, considering theaters are closed and actors can’t come within six feet of each other. Yet there’s some exciting work being done within pandemic parameters. This weekend I took in three remarkable performances developed during these locked-down days, as well as one recorded just prior to it (the riveting What the Constitution Means to Me, now on Amazon Prime)…plus three exhilarating Dodgers games. (Go, Dodgers!)
The forces that have kept us in exile want us to lose touch with our sense of democratic agency—they want us to feel that we have forever lost our worlds.
It was July 26, 1964. The article on page 26 of The Indianapolis Star’s Sunday newspaper would have been easy to miss.

A U.S. map peppered with red and blue has become the unofficial logo of the presidential election in recent years. But it hasn’t always been that way, and, like much in politics, it’s a bit more complicated.

A U.S. map peppered with red and blue has become the unofficial logo of the presidential election in recent years. But it hasn’t always been that way, and, like much in politics, it’s a bit more complicated.
District 8 Supervisor Rafael Mandelman introduced a resolution to designate the former home of pioneering LGBTQ and civil rights activists Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin as a local historic landmark.

Kenadie Cobbin-Richardson, executive director of West Side redevelopment nonprofit Nevada Partners, and Tyler Parry, UNLV assistant professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies, have ideas about how to fix Southern Nevada’s affordable housing problem. But — and this is a big but — none of them will work, at least not on their own. Like most forms of inequality, the housing injustice that leads people of color and poor and marginalized populations to be segregated in bad neighborhoods with substandard dwellings doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it’s part of a larger complex of oppression. In less than an hour, Cobbin Richardson and Parry touched on education inequity, mass incarceration, public transportation, rent control, student loan debt, and voting rights. And they were just getting started.

Hadeid Arreola sat at her family’s kitchen table during dinner about a month ago discussing the upcoming election with her parents and three sisters. Voting was important to her family, especially her parents, Mexican immigrants who became U.S. citizens about 25 years ago. They had always stressed its importance to their children.
