For reasons that are obvious, at a recent editorial meeting topic of conversation swung toward some of the most shocking things ever said by U.S. presidents. Of course Lyndon Baines Johnson’s name quickly popped up. LBJ, a beer-swilling, blunt-speaking Texan, didn’t shy from using what today we refer to as The N Word. One sentence
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Thank God for Tom Wolfe. He’s been coming forth with the right sort of right stuff for better than a half century, and he’s still at it. Or maybe it should be “chundering” forth. The verb of choice is Wolfe’s, who has allegedly scholarly papers chundering forth all over the place in this short book.
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I had an interesting conversation with a 12-year-old young man the other day. When I asked him about school, he explained how he never learned anything and had decided that it wasn’t worth it to even try anymore. Instead, he was becoming one of the “bad kids” and making life miserable for his teachers. But
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Imagine that one morning you discover a ring that grants you magic powers. With this ring on your finger, you can seize the presidency, rob Fort Knox and instantly become the most famous person on the planet. So, would you do it? Readers of Plato’s Republic will find this thought experiment familiar. For Plato, one
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In Iran this week, a young woman named Golrokh Ebrahimi Iraee was sentenced to five years in prison. Her crime? She had “insulted Islamic sanctities.” Iranian authorities had ransacked her home, and inside they discovered an unpublished fictional story that apparently frowned on the ancient practice of stoning people to death. It appears Iraee will
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It’s safe to say that Vladimir Putin is one of the most enigmatic (some would say ruthless) figures in the world today. Putin became acting president of Russia in 1999 following the abrupt resignation of Boris Yeltsin. Today Putin is in his third term as president – despite the fact that Russia’s constitution once limited
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