Reasons to be Cheerful
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Latest posts
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The Counter-Extremism Expert Building Our Capacity for Compassion
A former Los Angeles gang member, a former skinhead and a former radical Islamist walk into a youth center. What sounds like the setup for an uneasy joke is at the core of Farah Pandith’s work: Put people who might otherwise never share a room in front of young people;... The…
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The Student Movement Addressing Campus Polarization Head On
Just weeks after conservative activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated while speaking at a college last September, students gathered in a University of Michigan classroom to discuss freedom of speech. Sitting in a semicircle, they were listening to one another share their views…
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Truth, Elections and the Questionable History of the Club Sandwich
In the early-ish days of Wikipedia, my college friends and I had an ongoing contest to see who could introduce a lie into an entry that would stick the longest. If your goal is to smuggle mistruth into the internet’s encyclopedia, you quickly learn to leave the well-known stuff…
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The Student Exchange Program That Never Leaves the U.S.
In 1991, Saskia Sassen published The Global City in which she asserted that London had more in common with New York and Tokyo than it did with other parts of the U.K. The geography of culture wasn’t delineated by national borders, she argued — there was no need to travel... The…
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What We’re Reading: A Quiz That Reveals Americans’ Surprising Common Ground
Welcome back to our weekly behind-the-scenes glimpse at what’s getting our team talking. Tell us what you’ve been reading at info@reasonstobecheerful.world and we just might feature it here. To the polls If you’ve been following The Depolarization Project, our big series leading…
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Finally, Something Americans Agree On!
Patty Spillman and her husband farm over 400 acres of corn, soybeans and wheat in central Ohio. Both have lived in the area all their lives; his family has been on the land since 1861. In 2023, a developer proposed a data center on a nearby farm. “[The community] fought... The…
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Want the News to Unite People? Let Them Report It
Every few weeks, Jackie Jantzi sits in on school board meetings in Akron, Ohio, taking notes on her laptop. Afterward, she polishes a summary of what happened, to be published online, free for anyone to read. Jantzi is there working for local news website Signal Akron, but she…
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How ‘Artivism’ Is Driving the Resistance in Paris
Suddenly Darth Vader climbs up onto a chair in front of the Hôtel de Ville in Paris. Clad in all black, he swings his sword like a conductor’s baton while 200 musicians and volunteers, most in their early twenties, get ready. They unpack their instruments: violins, cellos,…
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The Door-to-Door Technique That Actually Changes Minds
One weekend, a canvasser — let’s call her Cindy — was out door-knocking and found a gentleman at home. After establishing that he’d heard of gender transition surgeries for minors, a topic that’s become a major focal point across the U.S. in the run-up to the midterm elections,…
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There Are Ways to Reduce Campus Sexual Assaults. Will More Colleges Use Them?
This story was originally published by The Understory. When I was a student at Cornell University, I read the book “Fraternity Gang Rape” by Peggy Reeves Sanday for one of my classes. That book was written in 1990, which was a long time ago. But then again, was it? I... The post…
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A Wall Meant to Divide Is Uniting Left and Right in Texas
In August, videos of bulldozers ripping up the mouth of the iconic Santa Elena Canyon in Texas’ Big Bend went viral, propelling one of the country’s most remote national parks into the national spotlight. Construction crews were hard at work in the early stages of cutting a…
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What Dementia Taught Me About Living Through a Callous Time
Just as President Joe Biden was showing signs of cognitive decline so conspicuous that he was compelled to drop out of the presidential race in 2024, my own father’s dementia was worsening. He lived with us, and yet he lived in another reality entirely. One where he no longer…