Design Issues Archives

How Pleasure Lulls Us into Accepting Surveillance

The domestication of surveillance technology has caused big legal and ethical implications for security on both a personal and a social scale.

Editors' Picks

Education & Society

When Americans Started Bathing

The first baths weren't about getting clean or relaxing. In the 1860s, experts agreed that the best kind of bath was a brief plunge in cold water.

Politics & History

Grave Robbing, Black Cemeteries, and the American Medical School

In the 19th century, students at American medical schools stole the corpses of recently-buried African Americans to be used for dissection.

Education & Society

Homophobia in Women’s Sports

Ever since women began to publicly play sports in the late nineteenth century, female athletes have been seen as threats and subjected to suspicion.

Arts & Culture

W.B. Yeats Loved Tarot Cards

The august Irish poet was once a member of a secret occult order called The Hermetic Society of the Golden Dawn. He was also an avid student of the Tarot.

Politics & History

Susan Fenimore Cooper, Forgotten Naturalist

Susan Fenimore Cooper, known as her father James Fenimore Cooper's secretary, is now being recognized as one of the nation's first environmentalists.