“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” — To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee We’ve discussed many issues, ideas, events (historical and current) during this reading group. Quite often, we explore these…

Humans are categorizing machines. Try this exercise: the next time you see a person on the street, try and guess aspects of their personality or background (gut reactions only — don’t think too hard about it). Maybe you saw an Asian male walking on Berkeley’s campus and inferred that he’s…

Women, overall, are underrepresented in science. If we look more closely at the data, however, we find that the issue of gender imbalance is more subtle. Fields such as psychology, biosciences, and the social sciences (excluding economics) exhibit gender parity. On the other hand, women are vastly underrepresented in areas…

The day after Donald Trump was inaugurated, more than 2 million people throughout America took part in the Women’s March. This was the largest single-day demonstration in U.S. history. …

Throughout our reading groups, we’ve repeatedly wondered whether many of the social and economic inequalities in America can be traced back to the education gap — the disparity in education performance between different populations of students. Thus, education reform is of particular interest because it may serve as a viable…

Why were we so surprised to see Donald Trump upset Hillary Clinton in the election? One reason was his divisive rhetoric: many thought it would alienate Republicans who would normally vote along party lines. After all, some members of his own party would not endorse him. As it turned out…

The readings provided a thorough background on the electoral college’s structure in contemporary elections. We had several misconceptions on how the college operates that the readings were able to correct. We spent the majority of the time discussing whether the electoral college is an appropriate method to elect the president…

In the recent presidential election, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote (62,523,126 votes to Trump’s 61,201,031 at the time of this writing), while Donald Trump won the electoral college vote (290 votes to Hillary’s 232 at the time of this writing). …