Author: Dr. Julian Vasquez Heilig
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The first time I watched Breaking Bad, I was late to the party. The cultural storm had already passed its midpoint, and I caught the final season as it was unfolding in real time. Yet from the moment I began, I could not stop. I watched every episode, tracing Walter White’s descent from a weary chemistry…
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Archimedes once claimed, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I can move the world.” It sounds like the kind of poetic exaggeration ancient thinkers loved, but it was not poetry. It was physics. Archimedes understood that power is not always about strength. Sometimes it is about…
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Last week I returned to the University of Michigan’s Department of Psychology, where I first began to understand how systems shape lives. Decades ago, as an undergraduate in Professor Lorraine Gutiérrez’s Community Psychology class, I learned something that still guides me: belonging is not just a feeling, it’s a structure. It can be built, or…
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In the Netherlands this week, a quiet act of erasure exposed a loud truth about America. When two panels honoring Black World War II veterans disappeared from the Netherlands American Cemetery in Margraten, Dutch officials did what many American leaders no longer do. They spoke up. They called it “indecent and unacceptable.” They demanded answers.…
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There’s a pattern in the current economic policy that most people experience but few name: the long-term consequence is higher cost and higher debt for the average American. It’s a system that rewards the powerful, disguises extraction as patriotism, and tells working families to be grateful while they quietly lose ground. Take tariffs. The last…
Cloaking Inequity 