Many goods are illegally traded around the world, including drugs, weapons, exotic wildlife – and trees. Timber trafficking is a multi-billion-dollar business that harms humans and the environment. Social scientist Kenneth Wallen outlines a strategy for curbing it by making contraband wood products both criminal and socially unacceptable.

Last week, when Kendrick Lamar became the first hip-hop artist to win the Pulitzer Prize for music, Georgia State University’s Lakeyta Bonnette-Bailey was pleasantly surprised. Less than 30 years ago, lawyers were challenging the obscenity of rap lyrics in court, while pastors were steamrolling rap albums in the streets. She writes about rap’s path from cultural pariah to Pulitzer Prize winner.

This week, a first-of-its-kind memorial will open in Alabama that pays tribute to more than 4,000 lynching victims in the U.S. Scholar Evelyn Simien from the University of Connecticut explains how this is an opportunity to remember the nearly 200 black women who were lynched, and also often raped. She writes: “Will this new memorial give these murdered women their due in how the U.S. remembers and feels about our troubling history?”