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“Man is a political animal.” Chances are that you’ve come across this line from Aristotle. You’ve also probably encountered the John Donne line that “No man is an island entire of itself.” And you may have heard them used to justify our life in modern society, where many of us are packed into cities and
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What does America risk losing with the loss of small, rural communities? Writer and farmer Wendell Berry has spent much of his writing career contemplating this question. One way he has approached it is through his novels and short stories, and his fictional town of Port William, Kentucky, typifies all that is best about small-town
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In one of my favorite movies, 12 Monkeys, Brad Pitt’s character Jeffrey Goines is a bit crazy, and we are first introduced to him in a mental institution. But there is more than a hint of truth in the following rant he makes to Bruce Willis’ character, James Cole: “There’s the television. It’s all right
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Critics of political correctness allege that America’s college students are now so immersed in ideological political activism that they are not learning very much. How to write English, for example. Editors at the Wellesley College student newspaper, The Wellesley News, recently wrote an editorial defending the intolerance now sweeping the nation’s universities. Unfortunately, in their
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A passage from Alexis de Tocqueville’s 1835 classic Democracy in America. It’s from chapter 6 entitled “What Sort Of Despotism Democratic Nations Have To Fear”: “I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men all equal and alike,
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Should the many welfare programs in the U.S. (such as food stamps, Medicaid, etc.) be replaced with a lump sum of cash handouts? In this week’s Washington Post, columnist Matt Zwolinski argues that they should. Zwolinski notes that such a scenario would create more efficiency in the welfare system, give recipients more human dignity, and
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