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    The War on Voting Rights
    John Shattuck. 10/7/2018. “The War on Voting Rights.” The Boston Globe.Abstract
    New op-ed by Carr Center Senior Fellow John Shattuck.

    "Eight years ago, on the eve of the 2010 midterm elections, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell declared that “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

    McConnell’s declaration of war on the Obama presidency ushered in the age of extreme obstruction and polarization in Congress. It also foreshadowed an eight-year Republican campaign to suppress or dilute voting by the coalition that elected Obama. That effort has intensified in the Trump era and is targeted at groups with low or uneven voting participation rates, especially minorities, young people, and immigrants."

    Read the full Op-Ed in the Boston Globe.

    Trump wants to “detect mass shooters before they strike.” It won’t work.
    Desmond Patton. 8/7/2019. “Trump wants to “detect mass shooters before they strike.” It won’t work.” Vox.com. See full text.Abstract
    New article on Vox highlights the work of Desmond Patton, Technology and Human Rights Fellow.

    Desmond Patton, a Technology and AI fellow at the Carr Center, emphasized that current AI tools tend to identify the language of African American and Latinx people as gang-involved or otherwise threatening, but consistently miss the posts of white mass murderers.

    "I think technology is a tool, not the tool," said Patton. "Often we use it as an escape so as to not address critical solutions that need to come through policy. We have to pair tech with gun reform. Any effort that suggests we need to do them separately, I don’t think that would be a successful effort at all.”

    Read the full article here

    “May You Rise to It”: A Love Letter to Students in an Unprecedented Time
    Timothy McCarthy. 3/30/2020. ““May You Rise to It”: A Love Letter to Students in an Unprecedented Time.” Medium. See full text. Abstract
    In a letter to his students, Timothy McCarthy calls for a serious commitment to compassion.

    My dear students,
    Let me say this first: I love you — and I hope all of you are somewhere safe right now.
    I know this doesn’t find any of us well. This global pandemic has profoundly upended our lives and livelihoods and routines and responsibilities, to say nothing of our capacity to work and dream together to build a better world. The corona crisis has catapulted us into complete chaos, accompanied by a disorienting mix of emotions: fear and despair, anxiety and anger, uncertainty and longing, concern and compassion. If you are like me, you’re experiencing all these things at once on any given day. As one friend put it: “I didn’t realize I could have so many mood swings before my first cup of coffee.” As a historian, I rarely use the word unprecedented — after all, almost everything has some kind of precedent — but I dusted it off last week and have been using it more and more with each passing day. History will have time to take full account of this moment, but first we must survive it.

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