Why Divestment Defeated Apartheid and How It Might Help Beat Climate Change

The Money Didn’t Matter. The Movement Did

The environmental activist and writer Bill McKibben estimates that climate divestment—the movement to pressure universities, churches, and other institutions to stop investing in, and thus profiting from, carbon-emitting companies—has removed close to $15 trillion from investments in polluting companies, marking a significant victory for Planet Earth.

That’s an incredible achievement over the short span of a decade. However, climate divestment’s increasing visibility has also cultivated an audience of detractors who argue that it is ineffective. Bill Gates is famously skeptical of the benefits of divestment because it doesn’t directly stop carbon …

Women’s Movements Can Save the World—by Learning From Each Other | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

Women’s Movements Can Save the World—by Learning From Each Other

After Many Years of Tilling the Soil, Transnational Feminist Movements Have Growing Momentum

Can transnational women’s movements save the world?

That was the title question posed, on International Women’s Day, to two Arizona State University experts on women’s leadership at a Zócalo/ASU Center on …

How Can a Society Apologize? | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

How Can a Society Apologize?

A Rabbi Asks Whether America Can Bridge ‘the Sea of Society and the River of Time’ to Atone for Its Sins

The Biblical story of the Gibeonites rarely makes it into the classroom of a Sunday School or Hebrew school, but the tale has much to say to 21st-century Americans.

The Gibeonites, …

The Global Women’s Movements That Helped Kamala Harris Rise | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

The Global Women’s Movements That Helped Kamala Harris Rise

The Vice President-Elect Rides a New Wave of Feminism—Led by Women of Color From Africa and Asia to South America—to the White House

As Kamala Harris readies to take the oath of office this January, she does so knowing that she will be the first woman, the first Black woman, the first Asian …

The Era of the Girl Is Now | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

The Era of Change Is Now

Las Fotos Project Celebrates 10 Years of Viewing Los Angeles Through the Lens of Young Women

The 18 teenagers logged onto Zoom that Thursday evening had every reason to sound weary. It had been, collectively speaking, a rough week in the rough fall of 2020. During …

The Woman Who Faced Down the Mob and Championed a Union | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

The Woman Who Faced Down the Mob and Championed a Union

Min Matheson Brought Her Transformative Vision to an Unlikely Corner of America

Labor leader Min Lurye Matheson made her name facing down the mob. She arrived in Northeast Pennsylvania in 1944, dispatched by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, or ILGWU, to …