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Sramcbled wrods: the real reason you can still read jumbled text

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 22:19:38 +0000

Sramcbled wrods: the real reason you can still read jumbled text Rachel Sauer Thu, 04/30/2026 - 16:19

Karen Stollznow

"Typoglycemia" is often shared online as a quirky insight into how our brains work, but this viral claim is only part of the story

You’ve probably seen it on social media before: a paragraph of scrambled text that looks like nonsense at first glance, yet somehow you can read it with surprising ease.

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteers be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

This effect, often playfully referred to as "typoglycemia," is frequently shared online as a quirky insight into how our brains work.

Karen Stollznow is a visiting scholar in the ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Department of Linguistics.

But this viral claim is only part of the story. To understand why it works, we need to look at how the brain actually processes written language.

There is no magical ‘rule’

The claim that usually accompanies this snippet is that as long as the first and last letters of a word are in the right place, the order of the middle letters doesn’t matter.

At first glance, the claim seems plausible.

But while there is a kernel of truth here, the explanation is misleading.

Reading scrambled words has much less to do with a magical “rule” about first and last letters, and much more to do with how our brains use context, pattern recognition and prediction.

We don’t read letter by letter

When we read, we typically don’t painstakingly process each letter in sequence. Instead, skilled readers recognize words rapidly by drawing on multiple cues at once. Psycholinguistic research shows that we process words as patterns rather than as sequences of individual sounds.

These include familiar letter patterns, the overall shape of the word and, crucially, the context of the sentence. Our brains are constantly predicting what is likely to come next, then checking those predictions against the visual input.

This is why we often miss typos in our own writing. We don’t see what’s actually on the page, we see what we expect to be there.

The same principle helps us make sense of jumbled words. Even when letters are out of order, enough of the structure remains for the brain to make an educated guess.

Word shape and structure matter

The viral meme suggests that only the first and last letters matter.

But this oversimplifies what’s really going on. We are sensitive to how letters relate to each other within a word. Common spelling patterns and familiar combinations make words easier to recognize, even when slightly distorted.

This is also why certain visual disruptions make reading harder. Text in alternating caps, such as “AlTeRnAtInG CaPs”, is difficult to process because it disrupts the usual visual contour of words. The same goes for “ransom note” lettering made from mismatched fonts, which interferes with pattern recognition.

In other words, readability depends on preserving enough of a word’s internal structure, not just its outer letters.

Not all scrambled text is readable

If the meme were true, any sentence with intact first and last letters should be easy to read. But that’s not what we find.

Take this example:

Salhal I cmorape tehe to a srmmeus day

It follows the supposed “rules”, yet it is much harder to decipher. In fact, this is the opening of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”

So why is the viral paragraph so much easier to read? Because it has been carefully (if unconsciously) engineered to be readable.

The hidden tricks behind the meme

Several factors make the famous example easier to process than it appears.

First, many of the words are short, which limits how many possible combinations the letters could form. Words like “you” and “can” are often left unchanged.

Second, function words such as “the”, “and” and “is” are usually intact. These small, common words provide the grammatical scaffolding of the sentence, making it easier to predict what comes next.

Third, when longer words are scrambled, the changes are often minimal. Adjacent letters are swapped (“wrod” for “word”), which is much easier to process than more extreme rearrangements.

Finally, the passage itself is highly predictable. Once you recognize the topic and rhythm, your brain fills in the gaps automatically, much as it does when listening to speech in a noisy environment.

The key to understanding this phenomenon is context. Words are not processed in isolation. Each word is interpreted in relation to the others around it, and within a broader framework of meaning.

This allows us to compensate for missing or distorted information.

But there are limits. As scrambling becomes more extreme, or as words become less predictable, comprehension quickly breaks down. Reading speed also slows noticeably, even when we can still make sense of the text.

Humans and machines

Interestingly, computers can now unscramble jumbled words with remarkable accuracy. By analyzing probabilities and patterns across large datasets, algorithms can determine the most likely original form of a word or sentence.

In this sense, machines and humans rely on similar principles. Not rigid rules about letter position, but flexible systems that weigh patterns and probabilities. This highlights why the “typoglycemia” claim is an oversimplification, rather than a scientific rule.

The idea persists because it captures a genuine insight in a catchy way. It reveals that reading is not a simple, letter-by-letter process, but a dynamic interaction between perception and expectation.

At the same time, it’s a reminder of how easily scientific ideas can be distorted as they spread online.

So yes, we can often read scrambled words. But not because the order of letters doesn’t matter. It’s because our brains are remarkably good at making sense of imperfect information. So good, in fact, that they can turn a mess into meaning.

Karen Stollznow is a visiting scholar in the ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Department of Linguistics specializing in the political and social history of modern Latin America.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

"Typoglycemia" is often shared online as a quirky insight into how our brains work, but this viral claim is only part of the story.

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A century later, a liberating education is still our mission

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 20:59:36 +0000

A century later, a liberating education is still our mission Rachel Sauer Mon, 04/20/2026 - 14:59

Daryl Maeda

A century ago, we needed informed citizens and clear thinkers; today, as the pace of change grows exponentially, we need them even more

Picture the scene when the Hellems Arts and Sciences building first opened as the hub of the humanities at the University of Colorado:

It was 1921, and the world was recovering from a deadly pandemic, Americans were isolationist, suspicious of immigration and deeply divided on issues of race. Also, economic uncertainty fueled doubts about the value of a traditional, liberal-arts education.

History might not repeat itself, but it sometimes rhymes.

This month, 105 years after Hellems opened, ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� officials celebrated its recently completed renovation, heralding the place as a nucleus of campus life, a common bond among most students and, still, the home to key disciplines in the humanities.

Today, we’re in the wake of a pandemic, with rising isolationism and contentious debates on immigration, race and a liberal-arts education.

Let’s discuss, starting with a definition of the “liberal arts,” which is important, given modern connotations of the term “liberal.” The ancient Greeks and Romans believed that a good education—one that prepared citizens to steer the ship of state—was the foundation of democracy.

Cicero argued that autonomous individuals who earn the respect of others must learn skills or practices to be effective citizens and stewards of democracy. He called these skills the artes liberales, which translates to the “arts of free people,” those with liberty—hence “liberal arts.” Cicero focused on rhetoric, literature, poetry, ethics, civics, logic, geometry, music, astronomy and natural science.

History has a home in Hellems Arts and Sciences, as does philosophy, English, linguistics, the Anderson Language and Technology Center and the Colorado Shakespeare Festival.

He described arts and sciences, essentially.

The fields we count as liberal arts have grown in the 2,000 years since then, but the gist—the idea citizens need all these skills to better participate in democracy and in life—is unchanged.

Today in the College of Arts and Sciences, the liberal arts—now with more subjects!—remain central to the education of all students. Across the nation, however, students and their families sometimes question the return on investment in a liberal-arts education.

As I’ve noted previously, it is true that those who earn degrees in engineering and business tend to command higher starting salaries than those who hold degrees in English or sociology. However, those with a liberal-arts degrees often enjoy mid-career earnings growth that can rival that of their friends in technical disciplines.

The monetary “return on investment” is compelling. But that’s not the only benefit, and this is not the first time we’ve had this debate.

George Norlin was president of ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� in 1921, when Hellems opened. He, too, responded to critics of a liberal-arts education, including Henry Ford, who famously said, “History is more or less bunk.”

Norlin penned an essay in which he argued that knowing only the present day was a kind of “prison” that kept a person from fully participating in civic and personal life. At the time, a liberal-arts education was called a “liberal education,” and he said this:

“A liberal education, or what we might better call a liberating education, has for its purpose … ‘a breaking of prison walls which leaves us standing, of course, in the present but in a present so enlarged and enfranchised that it is become, not a prison, but a free world.’”

Norlin rejected the “war-cry of charlatans” who demand that universities neglect liberal education and “become places of apprenticeship for jobs.”

He added: “Let there be more schools for the training of artisans—the more the better—but let the colleges and universities remember that, whatever else they may be called upon to do, their first business is to keep civilization alive and moving from vitality to vitality in each generation.”

Norlin, after whom the university’s libraries are named, paraphrased Cicero in the inscription above the main library’s entrance: ‘Who knows only his own generation remains always a child.’”

Were we to update that statement today, we’d use gender-neutral language. But I hope, as Norlin did, that it will reflect the university’s core purpose as long as they remain etched in stone.

History has a home in Hellems Arts and Sciences, as does philosophy, English, linguistics, the Anderson Language and Technology Center and the Colorado Shakespeare Festival.

As he celebrated Hellems’ reopening this month, ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Chancellor Justin Schwartz hailed the place as “where the ideas of the university take root, where perspectives are challenged and where intellectual confidence begins to take shape.”

The scholars in Hellems grapple with profound questions and promote critical thinking. The questions explored there have never been more important:

How do we apply the lessons of yesterday as we stride toward tomorrow? How do we find common cause across cultures and languages? How do we reason thoughtfully about what is right, true and ethical?

These are the questions the world must address, and our investment in Hellems demonstrates that the university honors this prime imperative.

A century ago, we needed informed citizens and clear thinkers. Today, as the pace of change grows exponentially, we need them even more. Embracing the wisdom of the past can drive us toward a better future.

Daryl Maeda is dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder.

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A century ago, we needed informed citizens and clear thinkers; today, as the pace of change grows exponentially, we need them even more.

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Should we want to die?

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 22:54:23 +0000

Should we want to die? Rachel Sauer Fri, 04/17/2026 - 16:54

Iskra Fileva

The human condition ends in death, but is there anything to do besides simply accepting it?

We are mortal. We are all going to die. What is one to do about it? Nothing, according to the dominant position: One must accept the human lot, and if possible, accept it with equanimity.

Premature death is viewed as a tragedy, of course, and we sympathize with fear of the inevitable even on behalf of centenarians, yet attempts to extend human life significantly are viewed with suspicion. What kind of person, the thought appears to be, would attempt to overcome biological limitations on lifespan? Someone exceedingly greedy, surely. Or worse, someone forgetting himself, like the character Braddock from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story “A Diamond as Big as Ritz,” who tries to bribe the Almighty with a very large diamond. Ultra-wealthy anti-aging champions such as Bryan Johnson seem to fit this schema and may provide support for it in the popular imagination, if unwittingly.

Iskra Fileva is a ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� associate professor of philosophy who specializes in moral psychology and issues at the intersection of philosophy, psychology and psychiatry.

Virtuous people, we think, may hope for immortality through their deeds or yearn for eternal bliss as an immaterial soul in heaven, but a desire for a much longer life in the literal sense is deemed unseemly. Research on life extension has, for many, the flavor of a Faustian bargain: We suspect that only those without scruples would try to cheat their way out of the human condition and avoid death.

On the other hand, we don’t want anyone to get too cozy with death either. While we may, if grudgingly, accept behaviors that increase the risk of death—think car racing or climbing the Himalayas—we don’t think it quite proper to assume control over the end of our lives, especially when that end isn’t otherwise imminent. I suspect, in fact, that widespread qualms about physician-assisted suicide have less to do with alleged worries about murderous doctors or relatives and more with the background assumption that death must come for us when it will and not when we choose.

To be sure, support for the two directives is not univocal—both life-extension research and the “right to die” movement have advocates—but it is very widespread. We thus seem to embrace two injunctions that pull in opposite directions: “Accept mortality” and “Don’t choose death.” Should we or shouldn’t we want to die?

Natural human lifespan

Perhaps the two directives can be reconciled by appealing to the idea of a natural human lifespan. We can say that a mature and virtuous person aims to live out roughly the span characteristic of our species and then die a natural death. On this view, one should accept temporal finitude without ever seeking to bring death about; open the door when the Grim Reaper comes knocking but stop short of trying to lure him in; face the inevitable without claiming authority over the schedule.

A crude version of this position can be easily shown implausible: After all, medicine can seem, in some ways, unnatural. But the proponent of the natural-lifespan view need not bite this particular bullet—she can argue, instead, that the proper role of medicine is restorative, not transformative. Medicine ought to ensure we get the number of years we are “owed” by correcting genetic errors or counteracting the effects of harmful environments without feeding fantasies of living for thousands of years.

But just what is so good, never mind normatively choice-worthy, about a natural lifespan and a natural death? I will take the first question first.

It has been suggested that a much longer life would get tedious or meaningless or both. Philosopher Bernard Williams, in “The Makropulos Case,” adduces considerations to that effect. The title of Williams’s essay is a reference to Elina Makropulos, a fictional character courtesy of writer Karel Čapek. Čapek’s Makropulos acquires the gift of life extension and initially takes advantage of it, but after living for several centuries, becomes apathetic, as if frozen in boredom. She continues to fear death, but at 300 plus, she is so jaded that she laughs when another character burns the document containing the secret of life extension.

Williams’ argument appeals to self-interest, not virtue, so even if it succeeded, it would not show anything untoward or Faustian about the desire for radical life extension, but let’s set this point aside. I suspect that Williams’ view, and Čapek’s, likely expresses what is sometimes called “an adaptive preference”: that is, a tendency to see the attainable as better than the unattainable, whatever the alternatives’ underlying characteristics. We don’t have life-extension methods, so we might as well tell ourselves that human lifespan is best as is. Moreover, barring the possibility of a dystopia in which anti-aging treatments are obligatory, no one in a world with life-extension techniques would be forced to live longer than they wished, so there is no need whatsoever to browbeat each other into adopting a preference for current lifespans.

I must note here that I don’t know how many believe the prudential argument anyhow. For it is also sometimes suggested that were anti-aging treatments to become available, their price would be prohibitive for most people. Yet, if a significantly longer life was not an attractive prospect, the potentially high price tag of life extension treatment would bother no one. As for the price argument considered independently, the obvious response is that we should work to make the treatments affordable rather than try to persuade ourselves that we’d have no use for them anyway.

The unborn

Another argument put forward has to do with morality rather than with self-interest: What about the unborn? When do they get to live? If we slow down aging by a lot, we’d need to drastically reduce the number of births as well.

This argument is well intentioned, but I don’t think it is good enough. No merely possible person is owed a chance to be born. A merely possible person is not a person at all, so there isn’t anyone that such a chance may be owed to. (Think of all your merely possible siblings or children. Who are they? How many of them are there?) The people who die every day due to old age, by contrast, are quite real.

But the most important point I wish to make in response to the pro natural lifespans position is this: Our intuitions of what lifespans are “fair” for us to expect are anchored in current lifespans, which are an accident. We could have evolved to live for thousands of years, like bristlecone pine trees, in which case we’d think it perfectly fine and not greedy at all to live that long. Or we could have evolved to live for several months, like many mice, and then wishing to live for 80 years may have seemed to us terribly selfish, nay Faustian.

That may be, my opponent may say, but we haven’t evolved that way. Granted, our intuitions are thoroughly shaped by the contingencies of our evolutionary history. Still, we mustn’t discard them for all that: We mustn’t because we don’t know what life would be like if we did live much longer. Forget fairness to the unborn and consider self-interest again. Had we evolved to live for many more years, one might say, we’d probably have psychological features that allow for good longer lives, but we haven’t. Given that, extending life is a risky business, a leap into the unknown. What if anti-aging techniques turn out to be a Pandora’s box, and we end up saddling ourselves with greatly extended but very miserable lives?

Gauging what is good for us

A cynic may quip that it’s not as though we are all currently thriving, but let’s bracket that retort. The argument from deeply ingrained features of human psychology should not be dismissed lightly. There is a certain wisdom in taking naturalness as a heuristic that helps us gauge what is good for us.

While there is no normative reason to prefer natural human lifespans, virtue does require that we desire mortality.

That's an argument for proceeding with caution, not against proceeding at all.

To be clear, I do not intend to propose a different optimal lifespan. It may well be that even were we to live for thousands of years, many would desire more. (This is the main theme in what may be the first sci-fi novel, Voltaire’s Micromegas. Elsewhere, I call this the blessing and curse of imagination.) My point here is simply that having a choice to live longer is better than not having that choice.

I conclude from here that there is no normative reason to prefer natural human lifespans. Virtue does not require that we desire mortality.

But does it prohibit desiring death on a given day?

It is difficult to see why. Note that a heroic self-sacrifice is seen as not only compatible with but also exemplifying virtue, so the question would have to be whether one may choose death for self-interested reasons.

The idea tends to make us squeamish. Since death is irreversible, the squeamishness is all well and good, but ought we moralize it?

No one argues that a virtuous person cannot prefer mortality in general, and some, as we saw, claim that she must prefer it. So why can’t one choose death on a particular day? What is so virtuous about dying only when you don’t want to?

There is a much longer discussion to be had about this than I can offer in this essay, but for present purposes, I wish to say the following: In opting to die, a person may hurt loved ones, of course. This is not a trivial matter. However, loved ones, in turn, must consider the person’s own preferences. (Entrepreneur Salim Ismail reports that his father chose euthanasia and spent the last days of his life in a blissful state. Ismail asked the attending physician about this, and she said that 20,000 people had had the procedure and that most of them spent their final days in a similarly happy state, adding, “We think it is because they have agency.”[1])

Or is the thought that it would be somehow terrible for society as a whole if someone were to choose death for private reasons?

A character named “Mr. Tredegar” in Edith Wharton’s novel The Fruit of the Tree adopts some such view in the course of an argument with a nurse named Justine Brent. Wharton writes:

“Human life is sacred,” he said sententiously.

“Ah, that must have been decreed by someone who had never suffered!” Justine exclaimed.

Mr. Tredegar smiled compassionately: he evidently knew how to make allowances for the fact that she was overwrought by the sight of her friend's suffering: "Society decreed it—not one person," he corrected.

“Society—science—religion!” she murmured, as if to herself.

“Precisely. It’s the universal consensus—the result of the world’s accumulated experience. Cruel in individual instances—necessary for the general welfare.”

Yet the appeal to general welfare is unpersuasive. We cannot impose on each other a day full of experiences that the recipient does not wish to have. The prolongation of life of a person unwilling to live is but many such days.

What, then, explains the Tredegars of the world?

My strong suspicion is that the answer, once again, lies in the naturalness heuristic. It seems to us against nature’s injunctions for a person to end her life. But an otherwise healthy and helpful heuristic, when too rigidly held, may become a superstition. I suspect, in fact, that it is precisely an awareness that we are in the grips of something like that superstition which partly explains why we tend to oppose life-extension: We fear the motivational grip of “naturalness” intuitions and worry that in a world with life extension, we might end up accidentally saddling ourselves with very long undesirable lives.

It is quite possible that if radical life extension became possible, there would be some who don’t wish to live any longer but who, having opted for another several hundred years, would be unable to end it all, a bit like a person unable to walk away from a cult or a very bad job. The problem may be exacerbated by the fact that in the alternative world, people in this position may appear and biologically be thirty-five even if they have already lived for three and a half centuries.

Still, we successfully combat instincts (including the survival instinct, if doing so could help save a loved one’s life) and rethink heuristics. At any rate, the question is whether this is what we should try to do or whether, instead, we must continue to maintain that a mature and virtuous person would always choose mortality but somehow never, on any given day, choose death.

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The human condition ends in death, but is there anything to do besides simply accepting it?

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A new era of gunboat diplomacy?

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 21:33:22 +0000

A new era of gunboat diplomacy? Rachel Sauer Fri, 04/17/2026 - 15:33

Tony Wood

Trump’s coercive tactics in Latin America evoke an earlier era of U.S. policy—and the rise of anti‑imperialism it helped spur

In Latin America, as in other parts of the world, the second Trump administration has adopted an increasingly aggressive policy.

From drone strikes on purported drug traffickers to increased tariffs on imports, and from the blockade on fuel shipments and threats of invasion in Cuba to the Jan. 3 military incursion into Venezuela, the U.S.’s more coercive approach to its hemispheric neighbors evokes an earlier period of U.S. foreign policy.

Many commentators have found echoes of the 1989 capture of Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega in the kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. Others highlighted the longer history of U.S. interventions in Latin America stretching back through the Cold War. That includes the Nixon administration’s support for the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende in Chile or the CIA-sponsored removal of Guatemala’s elected president, Jacobo Arbenz, in 1954.

Tony Wood, a ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� assistant professor of history, specializes in the political and social history of modern Latin America.

Yet as a historian of early 20th-century Latin America, I believe the Trump administration’s approach to Latin America more closely resembles an older pattern of U.S. policy. Between 1900 and the mid-1930s, U.S. forces intervened in one Latin American country after another. This practice was often justified by the Roosevelt Corollary, President Theodore Roosevelt’s addition to the Monroe Doctrine. In cases of “chronic wrongdoing,” Roosevelt said in 1904, the U.S would find itself compelled to exercise an “international police power” in defense of U.S. interests.

But crucially, how Latin Americans responded to the U.S. exerting its dominance in the early 20th century may hold some lessons for the present day. One of the major side effects of the U.S.’s so-called gunboat diplomacy was an upsurge of resistance and anti-imperialist thinking in the region’s political life.

The roots of anti-imperialism

In the 30 years after Roosevelt asserted the U.S.’s right to intervene across the hemisphere, U.S. forces occupied Cuba three times—in 1906-09, 1912 and 1917-21. They also occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934 and the Dominican Republic from 1916 to 1924. In Nicaragua, the U.S. deployed the Marines from 1912 to 1925 and then again from 1926 to 1933, waging a counterinsurgency in which it used aerial bombardment for the first time.

Across much of the region, then, this was a time when the U.S. was quick to resort to force, unburdened by any concerns for Latin American countries’ sovereignty.

Yet this era of external intervention also coincided with a period of remarkable political ferment, which I describe in my recently published book, Radical Sovereignty.

In one place after another, from Buenos Aires to Mexico City and from Havana to Lima, movements sprang up that put forward sharp critiques of U.S power. Many of them grew out of student organizations in the late 1910s, while others drew on the rising strength of labor unions and newly formed leftist political parties.

In 1923, rural workers in the Mexican state of Veracruz formed a Peasant League. From the outset, they saw local issues as closely interwoven with international ones, and they argued that there was a compelling reason for this. As the league put it, “Our internationalism is not the child of a crazed enthusiasm for empty phrases … but of the need to take preventive measures, to bolster ourselves against the enemy,” which they identified as “the imperialism of North America.”

Many of Latin America’s radical movements at this time were inspired by the recent example of the Mexican Revolution. The new Mexican Constitution of 1917 had nationalized the country’s land and natural resources, putting it on a collision course with U.S. companies and landowners.

Emiliano Zapata (seated, center), was a Mexican revolutionary who employed guerrilla tactics during and after the Mexican Revolution (Photo: Library of Congress)

Others still were energized by the global repercussions of the Russian Revolution. This, of course, included several brand-new communist parties across the region. But at the time, many others in Latin America saw the Bolsheviks as part of a global anti-colonial wave.

Mexico City as activist hub

My book explores the key role Mexico City played as a gathering point for these different political tendencies.

They included groups ranging from Mexican peasant leagues to the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, an anti-imperialist movement formed by Peruvian exiles. Many of these organizations converged under the umbrella of the Anti-Imperialist League of the Americas. Founded in Mexico City in 1925, it soon had chapters in a dozen more countries across the region.

Between them, these movements brought into focus the novel features of U.S. power. As the Cuban student leader and communist Julio Antonio Mella saw it in 1925 – at a time when his native country was highly dependent on the U.S. but formally sovereign—the U.S. was distinct. Unlike European empires, it largely refrained from direct control of territories, though it had pressed the Cubans to include in their 1901 constitution a provision allowing it to intervene in the island at will.

In Mella’s view, the U.S. was clearly an empire, one that mainly exercised its dominance through commercial or financial pressures. For him, the dollar and Wall Street were as central to U.S. power as the halls of government in Washington, D.C.

For Ricardo Paredes, an Ecuadorean doctor who founded the country’s Socialist Party in 1926, a new term was required to capture Latin American countries’ contradictory position. Formally sovereign, they were not colonies as such. Yet they were economically and politically subordinated to Washington and Wall Street—“dependent countries,” as he phrased it in 1928.

For the Peruvian poet Magda Portal, a leading member of the anti-imperialist American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, U.S. dominance played out differently in different parts of Latin America.

Fidel Castro (standing, center left) was influenced by the anti-imperialist upsurge of the 1920s and ’30s. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

In a series of lectures she gave in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic in 1929, Portal divided the region into zones. While countries such as Argentina or Brazil were mainly sites for U.S. investment, Mexico and the Caribbean were regularly subjected to U.S. military force. Or, as Portal put it, “Here imperialism wears no disguise.”

Portal concluded her lectures with a phrase that combined her analysis of U.S. dominance with a resonant appeal for unity: “We have a single and great enemy; let us form a single and great union.”

United states of resistance?

Yet while there was much Latin American anti-imperialist thinkers could agree on, there were also profound divergences between them. This included questions of strategy as well as issues of principle. What role should different classes play in their movement? How radical a transformation of society were they pushing for? And what kind of state should emerge from it?

Over time, these differences turned into deep rifts that pitted revolutionaries against democratic reformists, internationalists against nationalists, and pro-Soviets against anti-communists. These disagreements played an important role in Latin American politics over the rest of the century.

While many of these rifts became especially prominent during the Cold War, they developed out of earlier divisions over how best to counter U.S. dominance.

The anti-imperialist upsurge of the 1920s and ’30s was formative for a generation of Latin American radicals. Several of those who entered political life during these years went on to play key roles in major events of the 20th century. Raúl Roa, for example, who served as foreign secretary for Cuba’s revolutionary government from 1959 to 1976, was first politicized in the island’s anti-imperialist movement of the 1920s.

The men and women whose political visions were formed in the interwar period carried those ideals forward into the Cold War era. In important ways, the 1920s and 1930s laid vital groundwork for later and better-known radical movements.

Past is, of course, not always prologue. It is impossible to predict what the long-term consequences of current U.S. policy in Latin America will be, especially given the rightward tilt that is currently unfolding across the region.

But looking at the region’s anti-imperialist traditions does point to one possible outcome: The U.S.’s newly aggressive stance will, sooner rather than later, fuel a resurgence of anti-imperialist sentiment as the organizing principle for a new generation of activists.

Tony Wood is an assistant professor in the ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Department of History specializing in the political and social history of modern Latin America.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Trump’s coercive tactics in Latin America evoke era of gunboat diplomacy—and the rise of anti‑imperialism it helped spur.

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¡Ándale! ¡Ándale! ¡Arriba! ¡Arriba!

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 16:10:13 +0000

¡Ándale! ¡Ándale! ¡Arriba! ¡Arriba! Rachel Sauer Tue, 04/07/2026 - 10:10

Jared Bahir Browsh

With Speedy Gonzales set to make his triumphant return to the silver screen, the character’s redemption arc appears complete

“¡Ándale! ¡Ándale! ¡Arriba! ¡Arriba!”

Meaning “hurry up, let’s go,” the trademark slogan of Speedy Gonzales was, for generations of children, the first Spanish words they learned.

But by the 1980s, ABC had pulled his cartoons due to concerns that his dress, accent and characters like his cousin, Slowpoke Rodriguez, were insensitive toward Mexicans and Mexican Americans. The Cartoon Network followed suit in 1999.

Jared Bahir Browsh is the Critical Sports Studies program director in the ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Department of Ethnic Studies.

I’ve studied and written about the history of animation, including how characters have been received around the world. Though rooted in a well-intentioned effort at cultural sensitivity, taking Speedy Gonzales off the air was a step too far for many viewers. He was one of the few cartoon characters rooted in Mexican identity, and he’d become a cultural icon across all of Latin America. The ensuing uproar in the wake of his cancellation prompted the Cartoon Network to reinstate the cartoon mouse in 2002.

With Warner Bros. greenlighting a new Speedy Gonzales movie in January 2026, the character’s redemption arc appears complete.

A speedy rise to stardom

“The fastest mouse in all of Mexico” first appeared in the 1953 animated short “Cat-Tails for Two.”

He was redesigned with his iconic yellow sombrero and red kerchief when he starred in his eponymous 1955 film, which won the Oscar for Best Animated Short.

The short film features the general framework for future plots: Speedy helps members of his border community – a place inspired by Ciudad Juarez, just south of El Paso, Texas – evade the conniving Sylvester the Cat.

It opens with a town of starving mice looking longingly at the AJAX cheese factory through a fence establishing an “international border.” They try to determine who will try to outrun Sylvester, the factory’s guard. One of the mice says that his sister is friends with Speedy Gonzales. (Another pipes in that Speedy is friends with everybody’s sister, signaling Speedy as something of a Don Juan.) After they call on Speedy, he uses his speed and smarts to outrun and outwit Sylvester.

The basic premise also appears in a number of cartoons, from Tom and Jerry to Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote: An antagonist is consistently thwarted by a clever protagonist who avoids increasingly complicated traps and attempts at capture.

Speedy Gonzales is unique, though, in that he was the first cartoon star to be from a Latin American country.

In the 1940s, with the European and Asian markets cut off due to World War II, Disney had turned to the Latin American market. The studio produced “Saludos Amigos” in 1942 and “The Three Caballeros” in 1944 to abide by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy, which aimed to leverage diplomacy, trade and cultural exchange to improve relations with Latin America.

Speedy ended up appearing in 45 theatrical shorts. In 1969, Warner Bros. shut down its animation studio, but the character lived on in Saturday morning cartoon anthologies like “The Bugs Bunny Show,” which repackaged older cartoons for younger audiences.

Animation’s racial reckoning

The Cartoon Network pulled Speedy Gonzales from the air at a time when networks and studios were starting to reassess animated characters from earlier eras.

Many early cartoon characters, including Mickey Mouse, had been modeled after blackface minstrel characters. Warner Bros.‘ first star, Bosko, was originally patented as “Negro Boy.”

With Warner Bros. greenlighting a new Speedy Gonzales movie in January 2026, the character’s redemption arc appears complete. (Illustration: Warner Bros.)

Since racist tropes were ubiquitous in early-20th-century animation, films and shorts like Disney’s “Dumbo,” “Mickey’s Mellerdrammer” or Warner Bros.’ “All This and Rabbit Stew” were either pulled, edited or updated to feature a content warning.

But after The Cartoon Network pulled Speedy Gonzales from the air in 1999, there was unexpected pushback from the Hispanic American community and the character’s Latin American fans. Groups like League of United Latin American Citizens, the oldest Hispanic civil rights organization in the United States, declared Speedy a cultural icon and requested that his cartoons return to the air.

Back when Speedy Gonzales was first introduced to audiences, Hollywood had been filming more movies in Mexico and at the U.S.-Mexico border. However, most of these films depicted Latinos as either incompetent or villains.

In this regard, Speedy represented something different. Though the character’s English speech and accent reflected stereotypes – and he was voiced by a white actor, Mel Blanc – the character was ultimately a clever, quick-witted and good-natured protagonist. And the Spanish dubbing of his cartoons in Latin America had removed the stereotypical accent altogether.

Let the people decide

The trajectory of Speedy Gonzales resembles that of another controversial cartoon character: Apu Nahasapeemapetilon from “The Simpsons.”

An Indian immigrant who earned his Ph.D. in computer science in his home country, Apu becomes the manager of a convenience store in the U.S.

Some critics viewed Apu’s depiction as problematic; voiced by a white actor, Hank Azaria, Apu’s exaggerated Indian-American accent and catchphrase – “Thank you, come again” – was routinely mimicked and mocked by viewers of the show. Others, however, saw Apu as the embodiment of the American Dream: He was intelligent, hardworking and morally grounded.

Cultural theorists like Jacques Derrida and Stuart Hall have written about the complexities of how audiences understand – and either resist or embrace – what they read and watch. They ultimately argue that viewers and readers often interpret media however they see fit, regardless of the creators’ intent. For example, many minority groups who are underrepresented or misrepresented in popular culture will nonetheless find their own meaning and inspiration in characters, even if those characters weren’t supposed to represent those groups in the first place.

This happened with “The Goofy Movie.” Some audiences went on to describe the 1995 film as Disney’s first “Black” animated feature, despite the fact that the characters’ race is never mentioned. There were hints, of course: Black R&B singer Tevin Campbell played the movie’s fictional pop star, Powerline, and the themes of fatherhood and generational tensions eerily echo those in the play “Fences,” written by Black playwright August Wilson.

Of course, in the case of a character like Speedy Gonzales, depictions can become more nuanced as cultural norms and sensitivities change. Jorge R. Gutiérrez is set to direct the animated feature. If his work on films like “The Book of Life” is any indication, he’ll be well-equipped to bring cultural awareness to the animated feature – even if Speedy continues to sport his big, floppy sombrero.

Jared Bahir Browsh is an assistant teaching professor of critical sports studies in the ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Department of Ethnic Studies.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article

With Speedy Gonzales set to make his triumphant return to the silver screen, the character’s redemption arc appears complete.

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The case for the liberal arts is still compelling

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 19:16:33 +0000

The case for the liberal arts is still compelling Rachel Sauer Thu, 03/26/2026 - 13:16

Daryl Maeda

A broad education still opens the door to greater freedom—of career opportunities, life satisfaction and civic engagement

“Education is the key that unlocks the golden door to freedom,” said George Washington Carver. He knew whereof he spoke.

Born into slavery, Carver overcame multiple obstacles to attend college, then became a scientist. He framed the link between education and freedom literally, because, for him, it was.

In a broader sense and in contemporary life, a broad education still opens the door to greater freedom—of career opportunities, life satisfaction and civic engagement. It is unsurprising that a person in my position would say this. But the importance of the liberal arts remains compelling, and it’s important to explain why, particularly in the context of the College of Arts and Sciences.

In January, Provost Ann Stevens announced that the college would continue to be a unified entity, rather than split into three units: “To underscore that the arts, humanities, social sciences and natural sciences play a central and vital role in ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� mission as a comprehensive university that educates the next generation of informed citizens and leaders, we need a structure that brings our strengths together with purpose.”

The implication of the provost’s decision is clear: the liberal arts matter.

One could certainly be excused for having doubts. On several issues related to higher education, public support has wavered.

A liberal-arts education has been associated with high levels of civic engagement and psychological well-being. (Illustration: iStock)

In 2015, for instance, a Gallup survey found that 57% of Americans expressed confidence in higher education. By 2024, that number dropped to 36%, but by last July, the confidence measure had risen to 42%.

That modest recovery is good news even though it’s praise by faint damnation. There’s more to the story.

Research released in February from Lumina Foundation and Gallup found that, in disciplines ranging from healthcare, engineering to social sciences, natural sciences and arts and humanities, at least 90 percent of current students said they believe the degrees they’re seeking are conveying the skills they need to get a job they want.

As Gallup noted, there’s a dichotomy between the view of average Americans and that of college students. The students are much more optimistic. With good reason.

It is true that those who earn degrees in engineering and business tend to command higher starting salaries than those who hold degrees in English or sociology. However, those with a liberal-arts degrees often enjoy mid-career earnings growth that can rival that of their friends in technical disciplines.

It is also important to recall that while engineering, business and technical degrees do yield higher salaries initially, those with a liberal-arts degree out-earn those with two-year degrees or high school diplomas.

Remember, though, that all disciplines aren’t right for all people. Some students absolutely love engineering, business or technical fields. Others don’t and won’t, regardless of pay.

Money, beyond a living wage, isn’t everything. Studies show that the “return on investment” (or ROI) for liberal-arts majors is a key consideration but is not the only one that students should weigh.

For instance, a liberal-arts education has been associated with high levels of civic engagement and psychological well-being, and it’s hard to put a price on that.

Additionally, as experts at Harvard and elsewhere have noted, a broadly focused education helps prepare students for a future that is maddingly hard to predict. A liberal-arts education “is teaching you not a set of specific competencies in some specific thing, but rather giving you a set of tools to teach you how to think about the next problem over the horizon,” says David Deming, the Scott Black Professor of political economy who co-leads the College-to-Jobs Initiative at Harvard University’s Kennedy School.

Similarly, in a recent essay published in The Boston Globe, a Harvard student who studies applied math and film and visual studies declared that he was skipping a course on artificial intelligence—whose career impacts are undeniable—to take courses on math, economics, film and the science of sleep.

The student, Gabriel Wu, noted one study suggesting that exposure to AI training doesn’t mean succeeding in an AI economy. What shields some workers from automation is the one thing AI cannot replicate: their unique life experiences “and their ability to interpret problems through cultural, ethical, and social contexts accumulated over time,” Wu wrote, explaining why he’s committed to a liberal-arts education.

“Its interdisciplinary rigor pushes students to think critically across a vast spectrum of human knowledge, synthesizing perspectives from the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences to approach problems that no single discipline can fully grasp.”

I couldn’t have put it better myself. But in a series of essays in the coming months, I intend to try. Contrary to much public opinion, the liberal arts are neither irrelevant nor dead. At least as much as ever, they matter. I am obliged to say so.

Daryl Maeda is interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder.

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A slow drama in the red rock canyons of the San Rafael River

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 23:14:00 +0000

A slow drama in the red rock canyons of the San Rafael River Rachel Sauer Wed, 03/04/2026 - 16:14

Jeff Mitton

Intentionally introduced to the western United States in the 1800s, tamarisk is a bully of a neighbor that replaces native species with a dense monoculture that no native herbivores care to eat

The San Rafael River is only 90 miles long, originating at the confluence of three creeks emanating from the Green River in the Wasatch Plateau, two miles upstream of the Labyrinth Canyon Wilderness. This is red rock canyon country in Utah, rugged and sublimely scenic. It is a wonder that the San Rafael, which dwindles to a shallow creek during summer and fall, could have carved such deep canyons.

Approximately 15 miles downstream of the confluence is Little Grand Canyon, about 10 miles long, and at the Wedge Overlook, 1,000 to 1,200 feet deep. The overlook provides not only a fine view of the river below but also a panoramic view of Sid's Mountain Wilderness to the south and Mexican Mountain Wilderness to the east. The eastern end of the Little Grand Canyon opens to the Historic Swinging Bridge, built in 1937 to allow mining and cattle trucks to cross the San Rafael River at the Buckhorn Draw. Primitive campgrounds at Wedge overlook, Swinging Bridge and along Buckhorn Draw make this an adventurer’s destination.

The San Rafael River enters Mexican Mountain Wilderness at Swinging Bridge. From there, Mexican Mountain Road runs between the river and an escarpment of tall cliffs for 30 miles. This is a rough road, definitely 4WD-HC, but it is worth the time and jostling, for it leads to Mexican Mountain and three spectacular slot canyons: Lockhart, Upper Black Box and Lower Black Box. A slot canyon is particularly deep and narrow—for example, both Upper and Lower Black Box are miles long, and in some sections, each is 400 feet deep and other sections only 25 feet wide. In both slot canyons, the water is so deep that most of the passage is achieved by swimming or drifting in an inner tube. Upper Black Box is usually entered by rappelling vertical walls 60 or 80 feet tall. I don't do that. I have only peered into Lockhart and Upper Black Boxes—both provided awesome views and opportunities for photos of Mexican Mountain looming high above a deep and narrow slot canyon.

With all the pinnacles, canyons and cliffs to appreciate, it is easy to overlook the slow and silent drama gripping the plant community in the red rock canyons of the San Rafael River. In the early to mid 1800s, multiple species of tamarisk were introduced to the western United States, and today six species can be found on or around the Colorado Plateau. The most common tamarisk species is probably Tamarix chinensis (synonym ramosissima) from China. Tamarisk was purposely introduced to the southwest for its abilities to thrive in a dry climate and colonize and stabilize soils that no other plants could tolerate.

Tamarisk crowds both sides of an oxbow of the San Rafael River, strangling rabbitbrush. (Photo: Jeff Mitton)

The problem with tamarisk is that it is a bully of a neighbor, replacing native species, such as cottonwoods, willows and rabbitbrush, until the streams and rivers are lined with a dense and virtually impenetrable monoculture that no native herbivores care to eat. Although it has the growth form of a shrub, tamarisk is technically a tree, and dense stands turn into denser stands of deadwood, transforming the plant community and creating a fire hazard. Each plant can produce between 500,000 and 600,000 seeds per year, so when a fire comes, the dead branches spread the fire quickly, killing most plants. When the next rains come, an enormous bank of tamarisk seeds are waiting; tamarisk becomes more numerous with each fire.

Four or five decades ago I saw stretches of the Green River lined with stately cottonwoods that were inviting to campers, picknickers and fishers. Since then, tamarisk has moved in and changed that pleasantly shaded riverbank to a dense, sharp, scratchy thicket, profoundly unpleasant to fight through. In addition, tamarisk colonized the river's edge, trapping sediments and narrowing the channel. Some strands of cottonwoods, increasingly isolated from the water, have died. Narrowing the river channel changes its ecology for a variety of fish species. Tamarisk has many pretty flowers, but the only other civil thing that can be said for tamarisk is that it is very nearly the perfect weed: accumulates deadwood, is flammable and inedible, and has deep roots and high seed production.

When tamarisk invaded national parks and monuments and state parks, state and federally employed ecologists initiated control measures. Dinosaur National Monument, Arches National Park, Saguaro National Park, Mojave Trails National Park, Canyonlands National Park, Glen Canyon and Lake Mead National Recreation Areas all initiated programs to manage the perfect weed. They were joined by programs in the Colorado, Virgin, Dolores, Green and San Juan Rivers. It isn't easy to remove the perfect weed from a landscape. Fire, herbicides, chainsaws and bulldozers have all been tried, and although they can diminish the population of tamarisk, it always returns. Tamarisk is in the Little Grand Canyon and along the San Rafael River to Upper Black Box and below the Lower Black Box to the Green River. It is hard to find a stream or river in the southwest that is not being slowly claimed by tamarisk.

A new tool for the managers of public lands is being applied now. When tamarisk was introduced to North America, it escaped the herbivores that had evolved to eat its leaves and roots. But now, closely related species referred to as "tamarisk beetle" are being introduced to tamarisk thickets—including some in the downstream portions of the San Rafael River. Introductions by managers evoke both hope and dread.

Some introductions have been wonderful successes; others have been disastrous. So far, the managers have not seen any proclivity for the tamarisk beetle to eat anything other than tamarisk. Experienced managers do not use the word eradicate, but a realistic goal is to reduce tamarisk to a minor species in an otherwise healthy community of native species.

Jeff Mitton is a professor emeritus in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado Boulder. His column, "Natural Selections," is also printed in the Boulder Daily Camera.

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Top photo: Fremont's cottonwoods flourish along the San Rafael River in the Mexican Mountain Wilderness in Utah. (Photo: Jeff Mitton)

Menstrual pads and tampons can contain toxic substances

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 18:29:13 +0000

Menstrual pads and tampons can contain toxic substances Rachel Sauer Fri, 02/20/2026 - 11:29

Jenni Shearston

��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� scholar highlights what to know about this emerging health issue

��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� half of the global population menstruates at some point in their lives. Disposable products, such as tampons and pads, are some of the most popular products used around the globe to manage menstrual flow.

Unfortunately, studies have shown that many personal care products, including shampoo, lotion, nail polish and menstrual products, contain hazardous chemicals. Items used in or near the vagina are of particular concern because they are in contact with vaginal mucous membranes—the moist tissue lining the inside of the vagina that secretes mucus. These tissues can absorb some chemicals very efficiently.

People use menstrual products 24 hours a day for multiple days monthly, over the course of many years. Tampons, which are used internally, are surrounded by the permeable vaginal mucous membrane for up to eight hours at a time.

��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� scientist Jenni Shearston is principal investigator in the Chemicals, Environment, Equity, Public Health, and Periods (CEEP.) Lab.

I am an environmental epidemiologist, and I study chemical exposure, its sources and its health effects. As a person who menstruates, I also must make my own decisions around menstrual products and manage the challenge of finding accurate information about women’s health risks, which receive less research attention and funding than men’s health.

In 2024, I co-authored the first paper that detected metals in tampons, including toxic metals like lead and arsenic. My colleagues and I also wrote a review paper that surveyed the scientific literature and found about two dozen studies measuring chemicals in menstrual products.

The various chemicals that these studies detected were typically at concentrations low enough to make their health impact unclear. However, they included chemicals known to disrupt the endocrine system, which makes and controls hormones that are essential for bodies to function.

How contaminants get into menstrual products

The first modern tampon in the U.S. was patented in 1931. Nearly a century later, tampons still are made primarily from cotton, rayon or a blend of the two.

Chemicals may get into tampons and other menstrual products in a number of ways. Some chemicals, like heavy metals, are present in soil, either naturally or due to pollution, and may be absorbed by cotton plants.

Other chemicals, such as zinc, may be intentionally added to menstrual products to prevent the growth of harmful bacteria. Still others, such as phthalates—synthetic chemicals used to manufacture plastics—may leach into menstrual products from plastic packaging or be added as part of a fragrance.

Research suggests that these chemicals are present in a large proportion of menstrual products – we found lead present in all 30 tampons we tested. What we don’t yet know is if these chemicals can get into people’s bodies in a high enough concentration to cause health effects in either the reproductive system or elsewhere in the body.

Limited federal regulations

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulates tampons, menstrual cups and scented menstrual pads as Class II medical devices, which carry moderate to medium risk. Unscented menstrual pads are Class I medical devices, which are considered low-risk. These categories are based on the risk the device may present to a consumer who uses it in the intended way.

FDA guidance for Class II devices offers only a few general guidelines with respect to chemicals. For menstrual tampons and pads, it recommends—but does not require—that products should not contain two specific dioxin products or “any pesticide and herbicide residues.” Dioxins are a chemical by-product of the bleaching process to whiten cotton, and they are associated with cancer and endocrine disruption. Using non-chlorine bleaching methods can reduce dioxin formation.

The most stringent regulation of tampons in the U.S. occurred after an illness called toxic shock syndrome became a public concern in the 1970s and 1980s. Menstrual toxic shock syndrome occurs when the bacteria Staphlococcus aureus grows in the vagina on inserted menstrual products and releases a toxin called TSST-1. This substance can be absorbed through the vaginal mucosa and cause a variety of symptoms, including fever, high blood pressure, shock and even death.

During this epidemic, in which at least 52 cases were recorded and seven people died over a period of eight months, tampons were associated with the syndrome—especially a highly absorbent tampon called Rely, which was pulled from the market.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulates tampons, menstrual cups and scented menstrual pads as Class II medical devices, which carry moderate to medium risk. (Photo: iStock)

In response, the FDA created a task force that recommended standardizing the tampon absorbencies and advised consumers to use the lowest absorbency for their flow. This is why tampons in the U.S. now come in a range of absorbencies, from light through regular to super and ultra, so that users can choose the level they need while minimizing risk of toxic shock.

Living in a ‘soup of chemicals’

Just because a chemical is present in a menstrual product doesn’t mean it can get into the body. However, chemicals like lead and arsenic are known threats to human health. So it’s important to study whether harmful chemicals present in menstrual products could contribute to health problems.

Humans in the modern world live in what expert toxicologist Linda Birnbaum, former director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, calls a “soup of chemicals.” Simply being present on Earth means being exposed to many chemicals, at different concentrations, all at once. This makes it difficult to unravel the relationship between a single chemical exposure and health.

Nonetheless, science has shown that chemical exposure from at least one menstrual product—vaginal douches—does affect health. Vaginal douching is the process of washing or cleaning the inside of the vagina with water or other fluids.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends avoiding this process, which can harm healthy bacteria in the vagina, increasing the risk of vaginal infections and other diseases.

In addition, a 2015 study found that women who use vaginal douches have higher concentrations of a chemical called monoethyl phthalate in their urine. Exposure to this substance is associated with reproductive health problems, such as reduced fertility and increased pregnancy risk.

Can these chemicals be absorbed?

Scientists are working now to determine what concentrations of metals and other chemicals can leach out of tampons and other menstrual products. One 2025 study estimated that volatile organic compounds, a group of chemicals that vaporize quickly, can be absorbed through the vaginal mucosa. Volatile organic compounds may be added to menstrual products as part of fragrances, adhesives or other product components.

My team and I are now shifting our focus to the relationship between menstrual product use, various chemicals, and menstrual pain and bleeding severity. We want to see whether some chemicals will be elevated in menstrual blood, whether these chemical levels are higher in people who use tampons, and whether the chemicals are associated with greater menstrual pain and bleeding.

States are starting to act on this issue. For example, in 2024, Vermont became the first U.S. state to ban multiple chemicals from disposable menstrual products. California bans PFAS, a widely used group of highly persistent chemicals, from menstrual products. New York adopted a law in December 2025 barring multiple toxic chemicals from menstrual products.

California also enacted a law in October 2025 that requires manufacturers of disposable tampons and pads to measure concentrations of arsenic, cadmium, lead and zinc in their products, and to share those measurements with the state, which can publish them. More information like this will help support informed choices for millions of consumers who rely on menstrual products every month.

Jenni Shearston is an assistant professor in the Department of Integrative Physiology.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article

��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� scholar highlights what to know about this emerging health issue.

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Incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans holds lessons now

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 14:37:00 +0000

Incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans holds lessons now Rachel Sauer Thu, 02/19/2026 - 07:37

Daryl Maeda

The Day of Remembrance, Feb. 19, should focus our attention on how a constitutional republic can shun its first principles

Today is the Day of Remembrance, marking the date that the United States officially marshalled the full force and power of the federal government against Americans whose only offense was being of Japanese descent. This day, which now lives in infamy, holds lessons for us now.

On Feb. 19, 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which led to one of the most notable mass violations of civil liberties in U.S. history: the imprisonment of 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent without due process. Each year, the Japanese American community commemorates this Day of Remembrance to reflect on the lessons of that episode and resolve to advocate for justice for all.

Dressed in his U.S. Navy uniform, World War I veteran Hikotaro Yamada enters the Santa Anita assembly center after being forced to leave his Torrance, California, home. (Photo: Clem Albers/U.S. Department of the Interior)

The attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 exacerbated decades of anti-Japanese racism. Japanese immigrants were disparaged from the 1890s onward as an invading “yellow peril” that brought crime and sexual deviance, stole jobs and threatened to impose a foreign culture.

Before 1941, the federal government barred them from becoming naturalized citizens and eventually prevented their migration. Many states prohibited them from marrying white people and buying land, a serious impediment for an ethnic group whose economy relied heavily on agriculture. Despite these barriers, the Japanese American community grew to include Nisei, children born in the United States who possessed natural-born citizenship.

After Dec. 7, government and military officials portrayed Japanese Americans as a monolithic threat to national security, alleging that they could not be differentiated individually and were thus all potential spies or saboteurs.

As the historian Jacobus vanBroek reported, Mississippi Congressman John Rankin told the House of Representatives: “I'm for catching every Japanese in America, Alaska and Hawaii now and putting them in concentration camps and shipping them back to Asia as soon as possible ... This is a race war, as far as the Pacific side of the conflict is concerned ... The White man's civilization has come into conflict with Japanese barbarism ... One of them must be destroyed ... Damn them! Let's get rid of them now!”

New Deal liberals like Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson declared, “Their racial characteristics are such that we cannot understand or trust even the citizen Japanese.”

General John L. DeWitt, military commander of the West Coast, said, “In the war in which we are now engaged, racial affinities are not severed by migration. The Japanese race is an enemy race and while many second and third generation Japanese born on United States soil, possessed of United States citizenship, have become ‘Americanized,’ the racial strains are undiluted ... It therefore follows that along the vital Pacific Coast over 112,000 potential enemies of Japanese extraction are at large today.”

California Attorney General and future Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren called for the mass expulsion and incarceration of Japanese Americans just one decade before issuing the landmark decision barring school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education.

Members of the Mochida family, with government-issued identification tags on their clothes, await a bus that will take them from their California home to an internment camp. Mr. Mochida (back row, left) operated a nursery and five greenhouses on a two-acre site in Eden Township, California. (Photo: Dorothea Lange/U.S. Department of the Interior)

Newspapers added cruelty to the message. The San Francisco Examiner opined, “Herd 'em up, pack 'em off and give 'em the inside room in the badlands. Let 'em be pinched, hurt, hungry, and dead up against it... Let us have no patience with the enemy or with anyone whose vein carry his blood…”[1]

EO 9066 authorized the Secretary of War to remove civilians from areas deemed to be militarily sensitive. It named no class of civilians or ethnic groups and defined no geographic boundaries or criteria for designating sensitive areas.

The vaguely defined yet overwhelming power conveyed by the order resulted in Japanese Americans—accused of no crimes as individuals and receiving no due process—being removed from the West Coast and incarcerated in barbed-wire enclosed prison camps hastily constructed in interior states including Colorado. My uncle and aunt were imprisoned at the Amache camp near Granada, Colorado.

Barracks at the Amache internment camp near Granada, Colorado. (Photo: Tom Parker/U.S. Department of the Interior)

Three legal challenges by Gordon Hirabayashi, Min Yasui, and Fred Korematsu to the removal and incarceration made their way to Supreme Court, which ruled repeatedly that EO 9066 and its implementation were constitutional.

In what has come to be a widely admired dissent from the majority opinion in the Korematsu case, Justice Frank Murphy declared, “I dissent, therefore, from this legalization of racism. Racial discrimination in any form and in any degree has no justifiable part whatever in our democratic way of life. It is unattractive in any setting, but it is utterly revolting among a free people who have embraced the principles set forth in the Constitution of the United States.”

Here at the University of Colorado Boulder, the U.S. Navy established the Japanese Language School, which recruited some Nisei instructors out of the camps to train military translators and interpreters. President Robert L. Stearns supported the establishment of the school and urged the Boulder community to welcome the instructors and their families.

In response to the Denver Post’s propaganda campaign demonizing Japanese Americans, CU students voiced their outrage, writing in the school’s Silver and Gold newspaper, “Now that the Denver Post has embraced Hitler’s doctrines of race and Aryan superiority, now that the Post has converted this war from a battle of principles or even of nations into a battle of peoples, now that the Post has declared war on the Japanese Americans in our cities and internment camps, it’s about time we college students registered our protests against such fascist techniques in our midst.”

Posterity has condemned the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, which offered an official government apology for the “fundamental injustice” done to citizens and permanent resident aliens of Japanese ancestry and providing monetary compensation to those still alive over four decades later.

In signing the bill, Reagan said, “[M]y fellow Americans, we gather here today to right a grave wrong. More than 40 years ago, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry living in the United States were forcibly removed from their homes and placed in makeshift internment camps. This action was taken without trial, without jury. It was based solely on race, for these 120,000 were Americans of Japanese descent.”

What lessons can be drawn from this sordid episode that occurred eight decades ago?

Justice is not a partisan issue. After all, the incarceration was perpetrated by the administration of FDR, perhaps the most consequential liberal president of the 20^th century.
Unchecked federal executive power can lead to abuses of fundamental civil and human rights, especially when militarized forces are unleashed on civilians.
Compliant courts and legislatures cannot be relied upon to provide the checks and balances necessary to ensure that constitutional rights are protected.
Mass incarceration camps can be built in the United States and filled with both U.S. citizens and aliens alike without due process. Indeed, they have been.
History will remember the words and deeds of those who support justice and due process.

So today, and indeed every day, we are obliged to remember and to learn.

Daryl J. Maeda, interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, has been a faculty member at ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� since 2005. He holds a PhD in American culture from the University of Michigan, MA in ethnic studies from San Francisco State University and BS in mathematics from Harvey Mudd College.

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Top image: Boys imprisoned at Manzanar Camp in California (Photo: Toyo Miyatake)

Colorado has the mountains … but not the Olympics

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 17:38:57 +0000

Colorado has the mountains … but not the Olympics Rachel Sauer Wed, 02/04/2026 - 10:38

Jared Bahir Browsh

Fifty years ago, Denver was supposed to host the Winter Olympics, but fiscal and environmental concerns halted plans and highlighted difficult truths about hosting

With its infrastructure, mountains and the presence of the Colorado Springs Olympic and Paralympic Training Center, Colorado seems like the ideal Olympics host—and many wonder why the state has never hosted a Games.

Fifty years ago, Denver was scheduled to host the XII Olympic Winter Games during the state’s 1976 centennial celebration and the United States’ bicentennial. Denver’s bid was accepted by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 1970, but in November 1972—after a statewide referendum rejected funding for the games—the IOC was left scrambling to find another host city. Although Salt Lake City, Utah, and Lake Placid, New York, offered to host, the IOC, frustrated by the rebuff by Colorado voters, elected to move the games back to Europe in Innsbruck, Austria, just eight years after the city hosted in 1964.

Jared Bahir Browsh is the Critical Sports Studies program director in the ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Department of Ethnic Studies.

The Denver episode taught both the IOC and event organizers as a whole to secure funding, infrastructure and the support of stakeholders before granting any city or country the rights to host major events—although Olympic host cities continue to navigate imperfect planning, as the 2026 host, Milana-Cortina, Italy, races to complete the hockey arena in time for the Games.

From underdog to host

Denver was seen as a dark horse when the bid process began, competing against Sion, Switzerland; Tampere, Finland; and Vancouver, Canada, for the rights to host the Olympics. Denver won the first round of votes but came in second to Sion in the second round (Vancouver and Tampere were eliminated in the first and second rounds, respectively). Most of the IOC voters for the Finnish town ultimately shifted to support Denver’s bid, which was granted in May 1970.

After significant cost overruns and losses during the previous two Games in Grenoble, France, in 1968 and Sapporo, Japan, in 1972, Denver was promoted as the economical Olympics. The Grenoble Games posed a loss of more than $250 million, so when Denver submitted a budget of $14 million, the IOC voters may have seen Denver ushering in a new strategy for a more affordable Winter Games.

However, as the planning moved forward, it was clear the $14 million budget fell far short of what would be needed. By 1972, some estimates surpassed $100 million with a number of unanswered questions regarding the venues and facilities. The University of Denver was floated as a potential location for the Olympic Village, but university officials were never informed of this plan, which would have occurred during the school year.

The original plans also called for the alpine events to be held at Loveland Basin and Mount Sniktau, which did not receive reliable snowfall and were airbrushed with “snow” to cover bald spots in the promotional materials. Many of the plans for events like cross-country skiing had routes that ran through residential neighborhoods in Jefferson County, and plans for the biathlon—a mix of cross-country skiing and rifle shooting—included ranges near Evergreen High School.

Planning goes off course as the election nears

Because the IOC preferred bids that allowed for the vast majority of events to occur close to the host city, the original Denver Olympics plans promoted Loveland Basin and Mount Sniktau as being only 45 minutes away from the city—which may have been possible if I-70 was shut down. Officials then decided to move the ski events to Aspen and Steamboat Springs, both more than 100 miles from the originally proposed Olympic Village. They floated plans to have multiple villages and even discussed having a helicopter usher athletes between sites.

Along with having cross-country skiing events in Evergreen, planners wanted to have the ski jump there as well, which would have required demolishing a hill, rerouting a residential road and pouring concrete over Bear Creek. Maybe Evergreen residents would have enjoyed watching events out their windows—and through their yards—even if it meant dodging bullets and finding new roads to get to work or school, but it is doubtful.

Then-state legislator—and future governor—Dick Lamm, political organizer Sam Brown and environmentalist Eileen Brown (unrelated to Sam) formed Citizens for Colorado’s Future (CCF), which campaigned against the Games. The group collected signatures and ran an information campaign in the lead-up to the 1972 election that included a ballot initiative for the $5 million promised by the state hoping to convince voters to not approve the funding.

A bumper sticker produced before Colorado residents voted on a 1972 referendum to fund the 1976 Olympic Games, which voters rejected. (Photo: History Colorado)

The CCF looked to secure a meeting with the IOC, and when group leaders were rebuffed, they traveled to the Sapporo Olympics, where the IOC executive committee was meeting. CCF members ultimately crashed the meeting, to the consternation of the committee, and presented their findings regarding the true cost and environmental impact to the IOC. This caused Avery Brundage, who was attending his last Winter Games as IOC president, to threaten to pull the Games from the Denver Organizing Committee, which quickly put together a presentation to reassure the IOC.

The cost overruns at the 1972 Sapporo Winter Games and the summer games in Munich further reinforced the cost concerns in Denver. Munich also faced one of the worst terrorist events in sports history, which cast a cloud over the Olympics just months before the 1972 election. Groups like Protect Our Mountain Environment (POME) also held well-publicized protests in places that would be impacted by the Games, including Evergreen.

On Nov. 7, 1972, these myriad problems led Colorado voters to reject the $5 million Olympics contribution from the state, with 60% of voters choosing to say no to the state spending the money on the Games. The following week, Denver officially withdrew from the Games and then-Governor John Love, who championed the bid, resigned the following year to serve as “Energy Czar” under President Richard Nixon. In 1974, Lamm was elected governor, eventually serving three terms and running on a campaign focused on environmentalism and limited development.

Ultimately, Colorado voters were proven right. The 1976 Innsbruck Games cost an estimated $58 million, even with the use of existing facilities from 1964. The Montreal Summer Games the same year were one of the worst financial disasters in Olympic history, with the city, its province, Quebec, and Canada shouldering a debt of more than $1 billion, which was not paid off until 2006.

The early ‘70s bid was not the last time that Denver tried for the Olympics. Federico Peña, mayor of Denver from 1983-1991, pushed to bid for the Olympics even as the city faced financial difficulties. Denver also bid to be the United States Olympic Committee pick for the 2002 Winter Games, with plans that had the University of Colorado Boulder campus serving as the Olympic Village. Denver was beat out by Salt Lake City for the 2002 Games, which faced a bribery controversy over its winning bid.

Ultimately, the politics of Colorado, which include ballot initiatives and the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR), create a difficult path for Denver to host an Olympic Games. The concerns of 1976, including rising costs and environmental concerns, have only gotten stronger as some have questioned the long-term impact of hosting. Also, with the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles and the 2034 Winter Games in Salt Lake City, it may be decades until another Olympics makes it back to the United States—and odds are Colorado voters would not approve of the exponentially higher cost of the Olympics in the future.

Jared Bahir Browsh is an assistant teaching professor of critical sports studies in the ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Department of Ethnic Studies.

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Fifty years ago, Denver was supposed to host the Winter Olympics, but fiscal and environmental concerns halted plans and highlighted difficult truths about hosting.

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