People are upset that Michael Phelps, who won his 19th gold medal Sunday while competing in the 400-meter freestyle relay, was tapped to be Team USA flag bearer at the Olympic Games in Rio. Editorial writers around the world—here, here, here, here, here, here, here (I could keep going)—thought the honor should have gone to
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Looking back on the Great War today, it feels almost inevitable. If a discontented 19-year old Bosnian Serb with the devil’s luck had not managed to put a bullet into the jugular of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand on a hot summer day in 1914, something else would have triggered the chain of events that resulted
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The “do no harm” principle underlies many political and social arguments made over the last few decades. Essentially, its proponents believe that as long as one person doesn’t harm another, then he or she should be free to do whatever. Naturally, the thinking then extends to relationships between people as long as everyone involved consents.
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In grade school, I often naively wondered why slaves didn’t revolt more. The reasons seem fairly obvious now, of course. Oftentimes slaves had nowhere to go, and if they did (say, to a free state in the North before the Fugitive Slave Law was passed) they had to travel a long, perilous road to get
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In 1978, Alexander Solzhenitsyn was invited to give the commencement address at Harvard University. What he offered to the students and faculty some forty years ago was not your typical graduation speech filled with banal platitudes. Instead—in a perhaps unsurprising move for a Russian who spent 11 years in labor camps and exile—he offered them
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