When the machine gun gained popularity in the 1890s, people were so horrified by its power that some hoped its very existence would prevent wars. Only a short time later the machine gun would be used to kill millions in World War I. As a piece in The Atlantic explains, Hiram Maxim built the first
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1) “True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but the refusal to acquire it.” 2) “The attempt to make heaven on earth invariably produces hell.” 3) “Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem
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“Risk compensation” is the theory that adopting certain safety measures can actually increase risky behavior by unduly increasing people’s sense of security. In a Washington Post article earlier this month, Terence McCoy reported on a man who wants to apply the theory to football. Erik Swartz, a University of New Hampshire professor of kinesiology, believes
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You know the PC culture has gone too far when schoolchildren are prohibited from being good or doing good to others. Unfortunately, recent news has offered two prime examples of such behavior. The first incident occurred when a Minnesota high school girls’ basketball team was banned from playing in their league’s tournament. Their crime? They
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It is often said that the measure of a civilization is how it treats its weakest members. But when it comes to education, historically, the opposite is true: one can often judge a civilization’s staying power by its most highly-educated members. In Education and Culture in the Barbarian West, historian Pierre Riché notes that classical
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In the news, we often hear distressing statistics about how few books Americans read in a given year. As a result, we tend to be ecstatic if people simply read at all. But intellectual growth requires more than that; it requires that one becomes not only a reader, but a mature reader. In his famous
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