When I turned 13, my parents gave me a blue-flowered notebook as a birthday present. With that notebook as a catalyst, I began recording my thoughts, wishes, and experiences. My topics were erratic and impulsive: I’d write about everyday experiences, abstract musings, and my impetuous future plans. At the time, I wasn’t sure that anything
READ MORE
“He who pays the piper calls the tune” is a familiar proverb. Wiktionary tells us it means that “The person paying for something is the one who gets to say how it should be done.” It’s difficult if not impossible to argue against its wisdom. What’s the alternative? I suppose it would be something like,
READ MORE
“The ordinary acceptation of words in their relation to things was changed as men thought fit,” Thucydides records in his History of the Peloponnesian War. Those lines, written some 2,400 years ago, carry remarkable relevance for today as we witness contemporary society commit the same error of the Corcyreans that Thucydides commented on. And it’s a
READ MORE
By now you may have seen the video of a children’s choir singing the national anthem in the U.S. Capitol rotunda. The children are seemingly well-trained, and their training is made ever more beautiful by the acoustics of their surroundings. What’s unique about this video, however, is not their singing, but the fact that the
READ MORE
No event in human history has fascinated filmmakers so much as the Second World War. One estimate suggests that as of 2014, there have been over 1,300 movies made about World War II, and that number has only grown since then, with two more entries arriving in theaters this year: Sisu, the brutal story of
READ MORE
Demography nerds assiduously follow the data popping up about fast-ageing societies, their loss of dynamism and prospects of population collapse. With each successive generation significantly smaller than the last, we know where we’re headed. While population collapse is an environmentalist’s dream, it is an unfolding nightmare for humanity at large. The world’s economic engine, the
READ MORE
Most Read from past 24 hours
Most Read from past 7 days
Most Read from past 30 days
Most Read of All Time
Most Read of All Time
