Restoring Affirmative Action | The 2,000-Year-Old Cat | Saving Music Education

Mbye Njie had been pulled over three times by police in less than two weeks when he decided it was time to do something about it. To hold police accountable, he created the Legal Equalizer app, which allows users to record and immediately inform loved ones about encounters with officers.

Alaska’s largest city of Anchorage lost its mayor to a sexting scandal. His replacement, attorney Austin Quinn-Davidson, made history as the first woman, and gay person, to hold the role. “I think the most important role of a mayor right now is to inspire trust in government, and to make people feel at ease during a time that is pretty tumultuous,” she said.

A common criticism of cannabis legalization is that it did little to help people imprisoned for War On Drugs-related offences. California-based luxury flower brand Canndescent, is doing something about it, donating 100% of the profits from its new cannabis like Justice Joints to social equity and expungement efforts in the cannabis community.

Californian voters will find on their ballot Proposition 16, which would reverse a 24-year ban on affirmative action and is backed by at least five billionaires. One of them, Gary Michelson, used to think that a pure meritocracy was enough. “I now realize that expecting people to compete when deprived of an even playing field from the beginning is discriminatory,” he says.

Archaeologists in Peru recovered a new stunning geoglyph dating back to the Nazca civilization that was at risk of disappearing due to natural erosion. The figure is 120 feet (37 m) long and it’s thought to depict the Andean mountain cat, a small wild cat native to the high Andes.

As a marginalized community, LGBTQ people are likely to face systemic struggles in their lives—but that doesn’t mean that they can’t be happy. This is what motivated non-binary activist Jamie Windust’s to write In Their Shoes: “Positive stories provide people who are struggling with their identity, and those who are happy, a reminder that we are allowed to just breathe.”