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  • A Beginner’s Guide to Sex Differences in the Brain

    A Beginner’s Guide to Sex Differences in the Brain0

    Asking whether there are sex differences in the human brain is a bit like asking whether coffee is good for you – scientists can’t seem to make up their minds about the answer. In 2013, for example, news stories proclaimed differences in the brain so dramatic that men and women “might almost be separate species.”

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  • A Balm for Our Pain: The Power of Words

    A Balm for Our Pain: The Power of Words0

    Some time ago, my life collapsed like a building under a wrecking ball, a device of my own creation. As I sifted through the debris of those ruins, my sustenance came from the love of some family members, the comfort of two loyal friends, and the remnants of a battered faith. And from the solace

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  • A Backward View: Older Books and the Culture of the Now

    A Backward View: Older Books and the Culture of the Now0

    For almost twenty years, I have written book reviews for a weekly newspaper in Western North Carolina. In general, reviewers take an interest only in new books. This makes some sense, as older books have already received their accolades or their slings and arrows. A few critics—Nick Hornby in his collection of reviews Ten Years

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  • A 5th Century Guide to Happiness in a World Full of Pain, Loss, and Injustice

    A 5th Century Guide to Happiness in a World Full of Pain, Loss, and Injustice2

    My mother passed away in August four days short of her 70th birthday. When we lose something we love, it’s easy to feel bitter, resentful, cheated. It’s easy to feel that life is cruel, systematically robbing us of everything good until we are left with nothing. And while these feelings are understandable—forgivable even—they miss far

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  • A 4-Day School Week? Research Shows Possible Benefits.

    A 4-Day School Week? Research Shows Possible Benefits.0

    Could the traditional 5-day school week actually be a drain on students and teachers? That’s a subject explored in a recent study published by MIT Press Journals. A number of schools in Colorado have made the switch from a 5 to a 4-day school week in recent years, largely in an effort to manage budget

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  • A 200 Year-Old Warning about Education in America

    A 200 Year-Old Warning about Education in America3

    • July 20, 2015

    It was 1803, and America was just coming into its own. But Princeton professor Samuel Miller (1769-1850) saw trouble on the horizon in an increasingly utopian attitude toward education. In A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century he wrote: “On the subject of Education, the century under review has given birth to a doctrine, which, though noticed

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