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A note from our executive editor:

Today is the last day of our fall fund drive. I’m grateful to those who find value in our work and support it (as well as putting up with all the requests!). As a nonprofit newsroom that has no paywall and distributes articles for free, we need to ask you, our readers, to help sustain us.

Your dollars, whether its $10, $100 or $1,000, help support our evidence-based journalism – these important collaborations between researchers and editors – that millions of people read each month. In today’s lineup you’ll learn about the threat of AI to the 2024 presidential election, the decades of controversy over shorts and much more. And when you’re done, take our quiz to test your knowledge on this week’s stories.

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Beth Daley

Executive Editor and General Manager

The Shorts Protest of 1930 brought more than 600 students to the steps of Robinson Hall at Dartmouth College. Courtesy of Rauner Library, Dartmouth College

John Fetterman might be the first to try to bare his legs in the Senate, but shorts have been ticking people off for almost a century

Deirdre Clemente, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

As fashion norms change, what people wear in public becomes ground zero for hashing out new ideas of race, class and gender.

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