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Given the prison system's racial disparities, Ismar Volić, chair of the math department at Wellesley College and director of the Institute for Mathematics and Democracy, called the practice of prison gerrymandering "unnervingly reminiscent" of the three-fifths compromise, which allowed early states to count slaves as three-fifths of a person for census purposes.

Environmental studies professor Jay Turner writes for The Conversation about America’s battery plant boom. The future of these job-generating gigafactories, many of them in Republican states, writes Turner, could be at risk if the next president tries to wipe out the programs that made them possible.

Women’s books are in the spotlight at the 2024 Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair. The fair includes a range of talks on Saturday and Sunday; Ruth Rogers, curator of special collections at Wellesley College, will speak about what universities need to collect.

Katharine H.S. Moon, an emerita professor at Wellesley College, says that billions in government incentives haven’t reversed an alarming drop in birth rates in Asia. Women in South Korea, Japan and China tell us what could reverse the course.

Preserve or destroy? Korea’s last venereal disease detention center sparks debate. Katharine Moon, a professor emerita of Asian studies and political science at Wellesley College, noted that the debate represents a shift in public attitudes toward such sites, which some communities previously sought to dismantle to avoid perceived stigma. According to Moon, activists’ preservation campaign is more about “national history writing [and] keeping alive more permanently the ugly parts of history that people shunned for decades.”

Philosophy professor Julie Walsh was featured on Connecticut Public Radio discussing the seventeenth-century witch hunts in Connecticut and the question: are witch hunts truly a thing of the past?

“When we limit access to the power of math to a select few, we limit our progress as a society,” said Vicki Abeles, director of the new documentary “Counted Out.” One of many mathematicians who share their perspectives in the film is Ismar Volic, a professor at Wellesley College and a founder, in 2019, of the Institute for Mathematics and Democracy.

Well-off families have also drawn more on savings and earnings to keep up with rising college costs, found Wellesley College economics professor and Brookings Nonresident Senior Fellow Phil Levine.

Mfoniso Udofia ’06, author of the play “Sojourners” which opened October 31 at the Huntington, never intended to become a playwright. After struggling to gain traction as an actor, she “started writing in order to understand the world I was in.”