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When President Joe Biden announced he would withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by the 20th anniversary of 9/11, GOP hawks like Sens. Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham responded predictably. “Grave mistake,” muttered McConnell. “Insane,” said Graham, “dumber than dirt and… dangerous.” Of more interest were the responses of conservative Republicans who commended the president.
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It’s customary on St. Valentine’s Day to write odes, buy chocolates, and lavish romance upon the burning object of one’s affection. Approximately 140 million Valentine’s Day cards will be exchanged on the holiday, estimates suggest. But why do we do all these things? Most people, it’s safe to say, undertake these tasks without an inkling
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From the Foreword of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, in which he compares the dystopian visions of George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: “What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to
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Who was Mary Magdalene? What do we know about her? And how do we know it? These questions resurface with the release of a new movie, Mary Magdalene, starring Rooney Mara in the titular role. The question of how we know about her is a relatively simple one. She appears in a number of early
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I always thought Joan of Arc was something of a medieval legend, embellished over the centuries in a hundred paintings, novels, and films. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Rummaging through the treasure of cheap French texts in the Kindle store, I unearthed Le Procés de Jeanne d’Arc. Her 1431 witchcraft trial in Rouen was recorded word-for-word,
READ MORE“Masochist, exhibitionist, neurasthenic, hypochondriac, incapable of normal or parental affection, incipient paranoiac, narcissistic introvert … pathologically timid, a kleptomaniac, infantilist, irritable, and miserly.” This is how one scholar has diagnosed Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Harsh though this may sound, the details of Rousseau’s life (1712–1778) bear out this description. Rousseau’s ideas are at the foundation of the
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