President James Garfield named his beloved dog Veto. The pooch was a monstrous but lovable black Newfoundland weighing more than a hundred pounds. Congress got the message: A bad or unconstitutional bill would go straight to the Garfield doghouse. (Sadly, none ever did because Garfield served only five months in office.) The veto itself is a
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”I’m no longer quite sure what the question is, but I do know that the answer is Yes.” Thus did Leonard Bernstein famously conclude his Norton Lectures on the nature of music at Harvard University, 1973. This year we commemorate the 100th anniversary of Bernstein’s birth Aug. 25, a good time to unpack his statement.
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Sales of George Orwell’s utopian novel 1984 (1949) have spiked twice recently, both times in response to political events. In early 2017, the idea of ‘alternative facts’ called to mind Winston Smith, the book’s protagonist and, as a clerk in the Ministry of Truth, a professional alternator of facts. And in 2013, the US National
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Does it ever seem to you that a politically correct student can do no wrong? That question crossed my mind when I read about a recent incident at the University of Manchester. According to The Guardian, the University of Manchester recently refurbished its students’ union. Part of the décor involved a mural of the poem
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Perhaps unaware of centuries of evidence that suggests some kind of connection between excessive alcohol consumption and aggressive behavior on the part of revelers, including its own, the U.S. government launched a series of studies to learn more in 2014. Since then, the cumulative tab for the ongoing studies into the behavior of alcohol-consuming nightclub
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Sometime before the collapse of the German civilian government in the summer of 1917, chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg became aware that his phone had been tapped. According to the German diplomat Kurt Riezler, during calls Hollweg would scream into the line—“What Schweinhund is listening in?”—whenever he heard the click. (Schweinhund is the German word for
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