Walking Chicago

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At 67, Jesse reflects on being part of the first class to desegregate in Brewton, Alabama, in 1972. The change came years after the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited racial discrimination in federally funded programs, and amid federal court orders requiring Alabama school systems, including Brewton, to adopt desegregation plans beginning in the 1967–68 school year. Yet the process was far from immediate: a 1968 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report found that just 1.7% of Black students across the Alabama school systems it examined were attending formerly all-white schools. <Cite refs={[“turn523742search12”,“turn523742search13”]}/> Jesse experienced this history as a child, not as a statistic. Growing up in rural Alabama, he was shaped by a mother who taught him to see equality and fairness as basic principles of life. His recollections offer a personal view of what desegregation looked like on the ground, and how the values instilled at home can shape a lifelong commitment to antiracism and social justice. These are the stories worth preserving, because history is not just what happened in courtrooms and legislatures; it is what happened to the people who lived through it. #gayhistory #CivilRightsHistory #Desegregation #OralHistory #walkingchicago

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Queer archives give me hope that today’s aromantic culture is not inevitable. In the letters, photographs, personal collections, and oral histories of queer people who came before us, I see evidence of lives built around friendship, intimacy, chosen family, and the desire to belong to one another. These records preserve a world in which queer community meant showing up for each other, creating spaces to gather, and finding ways to love one another despite the odds. I want a future where we recover that sense of possibility, where intimacy is not treated as a liability and human connection is not sacrificed to individualism. Our elders left behind more than historical artifacts. They left evidence that we are capable of building richer, more connected queer lives than the culture we have inherited today. #QueerHistory #QueerArchives #LGBTQHistory #QueerCommunity #WalkingChicago

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Instagram exploits well-established features of human cognition: our sensitivity to social approval, our attraction to novelty, and our tendency to repeat behaviors that deliver unpredictable rewards. Every notification, like, and new post gives us another reason to check the app, reinforcing a cycle of attention and reward. During lockdown, these platforms became substitutes for in-person social interaction. But the habits they encouraged did not disappear when we could finally see one another again. We carried them into our relationships, our dinners, our conversations, and our bedrooms. The neuroscience is straightforward: attention is limited, and you cannot be fully present with someone while continually redirecting your attention toward a screen. Instagram offers a constant stream of social stimulation that competes with the slower, less predictable rewards of real intimacy. Over time, we can become conditioned to reach for our phones even when the people we love are right in front of us. The result is a particularly cruel contradiction: we spend hours consuming the lives of people we barely know while giving less attention to the people who actually know us. Instagram doesn’t need to eliminate human connection to undermine it. It only needs to keep us looking away. #CognitiveNeuroscience #Instagram #DigitalCulture #HumanConnection #WalkingChicago