Note: Thanks to Siddhartha Mukherjee.

Over at Open Culture:

Some of the most-referenced Western political thinkers—like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Thomas Jefferson—have taken hierarchies of class, race, or both, for granted. Not so some of their more radical contemporaries, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Paine, who made forceful arguments against inequality. A strain of utopianism runs through more egalitarian positions, and a calculating pragmatism through more libertarian. Rarely have these two threads woven neatly together.

In the work of 20th century political philosopher John Rawls, they do, with maybe a knot or a kink here and there, in a unique philosophy first articulated in his 1971 book A Theory of Justice, a novel attempt at reconciling abstract principles of liberty and equality (recently turned into a musical.)

More here.

Via Open Culture:

Alex Landau, an African American man, was raised by his adoptive white parents to believe that skin color didn’t matter. But when Alex was pulled over by Denver police officers one night in 2009, he lost his belief in a color-blind world—and nearly lost his life. Alex tells his mother, Patsy Hathaway, what happened that night and how it affects him to this day.