Education & Information

Still think the Civil War wasn't fought over slavery? The Confederate states would disagree.

Ryan Schultz/Creative Commons

Was the Civil War fought over slavery or states' rights? People love to debate this question, and many seem to believe it's a matter of opinion.

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In a deeply personal interview, Kobe Bryant once shared how education can combat racism

While basketball fans mourn Kobe Bryant's sudden passing, others demonstrate inadvertent racism when speaking of the basketball legend's death. The BBC ran a photo of LeBron James instead of Bryant when reporting on Bryant's helicopter crash. Sure, they played on the team, but they don't even look alike. The BBC apologized for the mistake, calling it "human error." But it's hard not to think the human error being committed was the error of being racist.

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Education & Information

Lessons we should have learned from the liberation of Auschwitz and other Nazi camps

Photo by Jean Carlo Emer on Unsplash

From 1940 to 1945, an estimated 1.3 million people were deported to Auschwitz, the largest complex of Nazi concentration camps. More than four out of five of those people—at least 1.1 million people—were murdered there.

On January 27, 1945, Soviet forces liberated the final prisoners from these camps—7,000 people, most of whom were sick or dying. Those of us with a decent public education are familiar with at least a few names of Nazi extermination facilities—Auschwitz, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen—but these are merely a few of the thousands (yes, thousands) of concentration camps, sub camps, and ghettos spread across Europe where Jews and other targets of Hitler's regime were persecuted, tortured, and killed by the millions.

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Child abuse pediatrician corrects falsehoods about virginity with a vital anatomy lesson

Facebook / Veve Bee

It's incredible how many myths about the female body persist, despite all of us living in the information age. Young and old, educated or not, we're all susceptible to misinformation — especially when the same false info gets shared widely without question or correction.

Exhibit A: The female hymen.

Rapper T.I. made headlines recently with his horrific description of accompanying his 18-year-old daughter to the gynecologist to have her hymen checked. According to him and countless others like him, the hymen is a sign of virginity — a gateway of sorts that indicates whether or not a woman has had sex (or otherwise been vaginally penetrated). Popular belief has it that the hymen is a thin layer of tissue in the vagina that "breaks" the first time a woman has sex, so an "intact" hymen is proof of virginity.

The problem is that's a bunch of anatomically incorrect hogwash.

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