Steven Mazie
Professor of Political Studies, BHSEC-Manhattan | Supreme Court Correspondent, The Economist
Steven V. Mazie is Professor of Political Studies at Bard High School Early College-Manhattan and Supreme Court Correspondent for The Economist. He holds an A.B. in Government from Harvard College and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Michigan. Mazie’s recent publications include “Up from Colorblindness: Equality, Race and the Lessons of Ricci v. DeStefano” (2011), “Rawls on Wall Street” at the New York Times (2011),“Equality, Race and Gifted Education: An Egalitarian Critique of Admission to New York City’s Specialized High Schools” (2009) and Israel’s Higher Law: Religion and Liberal Democracy in the Jewish State (2006). He has taught at the University of Michigan (1998), New York University (2001) and Bard College (2005, 2011).
There are three kinds of BS, explains Stewart, and all three made appearances last night.
If you’re one of the 85,000 readers who took the three-question quiz I posted last week, chances are you answered some items incorrectly. Like some of my smart, accomplished friends and family […]
If you avoid the common errors of reasoning that lead large majorities of subjects to do the irrational thing on repeated experiments, you may justly gloat a little.
Since 1979, middle-income workers have seen their wages rise 6 percent. That’s an average raise of 0.167 percent a year.
In his dissent in Obergefell v. Hodges, the ruling that made same-sex marriage a constitutional right throughout the United States, Justice Clarence Thomas rejected the majority’s rationale that gays and […]
The final weeks of the 2014-2015 Supreme Court term brought us a bumper crop of quotable lines from the ever-cantankerous Antonin Scalia. Justice Scalia has never been shy on the bench, but as he approaches the end of his third decade on the court, he is letting loose to a degree that is surprising even for him. Some say the Ronald Reagan appointee may even be growing a touch unhinged.
“How are you?” It’s a question we ask each other every day, almost reflexively, and we rarely pause to think when responding: “Fine, thanks. You?” Of course, these frequent exchanges are […]
The death of any given person is just a lack of connectedness to future experiences.
The Supreme Court has considered a host of hotly divisive issues in the term that is wrapping up in just a couple of weeks. In addition to rulings on gay […]
An exposé in this week’s issue of The New Yorker on the surprising depth of jihadist poetry should be required reading for everyone on the swelling list of candidates for president […]
It's all about how seriously you take the concept of moral duty.
“Daddy, why do all the players have dark skin?” When my eldest daughter posed this question one football Saturday six years ago, she had no concept of race in mind […]
College isn't a time to curl up in a ball when challenging material comes on the table that might unsettle you or puncture your worldview. A higher education can be, and should be, transformative.
Chris Cuomo, a CNN anchor and the brother of New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, performed a valuable public service on Wednesday when he sent what I would hope is the […]
Sitting cheek-by-jowl in the packed press gallery at the Supreme Court on Tuesday and listening to 150 minutes of oral arguments in the historic same-sex marriage cases, I marveled at […]
The American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), an odious right-wing organization dedicated to spreading offensive messages about Muslims, won a federal court battle this week against the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) […]
President John F. Kennedy famously implored Americans to ask “what you can do for your country” rather than “what your country can do for you.” That’s nice rhetoric, but the […]
There are some weak arguments against marriage equality. Then there's this one.
He hasn’t shot an episode of Let’s Make a Deal for decades, but Monty Hall’s name still graces a statistical brouhaha from the early 1990s, and the drama he cultivated on […]
The more education people have, the more ignorant they may be. Ignoring our ignorance and assuming we know much more than we actually do seems to be a universal human tendency.
Fewer grammar is literally no skin off anyone’s cheek.
In January, Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, threw down the gauntlet on education in his State of the State Address: “Last year, less than 1 percent of teachers in New […]
New York neuroticism is the obverse of Kantian tranquility: harried, unsatisfied, anxious, perturbed. A life filled with worry and noise rather than one steeped in calm and virtue. But is this necessarily a bad thing?
Last week, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) v Abercrombie & Fitch Stores, a case involving a Muslim woman whose headscarf, or hijab, disqualified […]
Far from using Islam as a mere facade for bloodlust the Islamic State’s interpretations of Koranic teachings are fundamental to its mission.
An op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times by sociologist Phil Zuckerman supplied a reassuring answer for secular parents: absolutely. In the face of a previous study finding that children […]
OK, smartphone user (yes, we know that most of you, at this very moment, are now peering down onto a rectangular screen), have you ever wasted time on your phone? Of […]
I won’t make you wait: the answer is no. But Article IV, section 2 of the Constitution, which spells that out, is apparently no obstacle for Roy Moore, the Chief […]
The fallacy doesn’t only wreak havoc on the individual making irrational decisions; it can seriously impact the lives of other people who are affected by those decisions.
Spin a roulette wheel a million times, and you'll see a fairly even split between black and red. But spin it a few dozen times, and there might be "streaks" of one or the other. The gambler's fallacy leads bettors to believe that they odds are better if they bet against the streak. But the wheel has no memory of previous spins; for each round, leaving aside those pesky green zeroes, the odds for each color are always going to be 50-50.