The Lost Empire that Ruled the Silk Road, Annalee Newitz, io9, April 15, 2014

Today, the city of Samarkand in Uzbekistan is relatively remote, known mostly for its magnificent medieval ruins. But over a millennium ago, it was one of the richest cities on the infamous trade route known as the Silk Road. Back in the 600s CE, that route was called simply “the road to Samarkand.”

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The term “Silk Road” was popularized by European explorers in the nineteenth century. German scientist Ferdinand von Richthofen coined the term in 1877, while attempting to follow its eroded pathways centuries after the world economy had come to rely on ocean shipping routes. Also, there is no evidence that anyone traveled along the entire route from Europe to China until Marco Polo wrote about his journey in the thirteenth century. (Polo probably wasn’t the first traveler to do this, but his account popularized the idea and led to many more journeys.)

But for most people the Silk Road was just a local highway system. They used the routes to go from one city to another, and more rarely to cross the borders between empires.

Bill Russell, Boston Celtics Veteran, Sounds Off On Gay Athletes, Jim Vertuno, AP, April 10, 2014

NBA Hall of Famer Bill Russell said Wednesday that gay athletes’ current fight for equality and acceptance reminds him of some of the same struggles black athletes faced in the 1960s.

Russell, who won 11 NBA championships with the Boston Celtics, said talk about whether gay athletes can be good teammates or if they might disrupt locker rooms are the same questions black athletes heard years ago, when colleges and professional leagues were struggling with the concept of integration.”It seems to me, a lot of questions about gay athletes, were the same questions they used to ask about us,” Russell said during a panel discussion at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, which is hosting a summit celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act.

Russell said he would have only one question about a gay teammate: Can he play?

Does Traditional College Debate Reinforce White Privilege? Jessica Carew Kraft, The Atlantic, April 16, 2014

These days, an increasingly diverse group of participants has transformed debate competitions, mounting challenges to traditional form and content by incorporating personal experience, performance, and radical politics. These “alternative-style” debaters have achieved success, too, taking top honors at national collegiate tournaments over the past few years.

But this transformation has also sparked a difficult, often painful controversy for a community that prides itself on handling volatile topics.

On March 24, 2014 at the Cross Examination Debate Association (CEDA) Championships at Indiana University, two Towson University students, Ameena Ruffin and Korey Johnson, became the first African-American women to win a national college debate tournament, for which the resolution asked whether the U.S. president’s war powers should be restricted. Rather than address the resolution straight on, Ruffin and Johnson, along with other teams of African-Americans, attacked its premise. The more pressing issue, they argued, is how the U.S. government is at war with poor black communities.

Photo credit: Торжествуют (They are triumphant) by Vasily Vereshchagin [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.