Reflection by David Lai Education Team Leader Amidst all the other dramatic headlines of the past month, I ran across a local article detailing the Silicon Valley Index ’s recently released report on income inequality here at home. There’s a lot of expected results: tech makes up a big share of our economy, the region remains generally diverse albeit racially segregated, health and education remain generally accessible. I was also not surprised to read that affordable housing

Reflection by David Lai Education Team Leader Growing up, it was hard for me to understand why anyone was a Pharisee. The impression I got from Sunday School was that they were not just legalistic and not very much fun, but also greedy, prideful, and spiteful. Or, as the children’s song I once learned put it: Don’t wanna be a Pharisee Don’t wanna be a Pharisee ‘Cause they’re not fair you see Don’t wanna be a Pharisee Yet as I’ve gotten older and learned more about church his

Reflection by David Lai Education Team Leader Despite always being fond of history, it was only during graduate school that I really started considering historiography, which is, basically, the history of history. The classic example I learned was the historiography of American chattel slavery. To summarize, back in the post-Reconstruction days, scholars, drawing from slaveowners’ statements and texts, concluded that slavery was not so much economic but paternalistic, a way o