During the question-and-answer period after a lecture on ancient Rome, an audience member asked me, “Who would you rank as the Empire’s worst Emperor?” That was a tough one. I deplore concentrated power so I really don’t like any of them. Of the grand total of 178 emperors—81 in the Western Empire and 97 in
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It is wrong to ask someone intrusive questions about his private life. A federal appeals court made that clear in allowing a woman to sue over invasive questions by federal officials. It ruled that she had a plausible claim that federal officials violated her constitutional privacy rights by questioning her about private details of her
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Religion is a vital source for change, but it does not yield easily to what the political philosopher John Rawls in 1997 called the ‘public reason’ that enables liberal democracies. In the late 1960s, for example, a new group of radicals, known as liberation theologians, challenged the accommodation of religion to an unjust society. The
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The best way to grasp how sociology has managed to make color-blind racism (CBR) seem believable is to study its Newspeak (to continue the Orwell theme). Whiteness To many modern sociologists, color blindness is a racist weapon that works, somehow, through whiteness, a scheme of thought invisible to most whites, but revealed by CBR sociology. Whiteness
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U.S. Special counsel Robert Mueller on Feb. 16 indicted Russian individuals and entities for interference in the U.S. presidential election. This is not a one-off act of Russian interference. In the previous nine years, Russia has invaded its neighbor Georgia, annexed the Ukrainian province of Crimea and supported rebels in Eastern Ukraine. As a historian
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In July, the mayor of San Francisco frankly stated that poverty in the city is so bad, that “there is more feces on the sidewalks than I’ve ever seen.” And it’s not just her – the local NBC investigative unit found a “dangerous mix of drug needles, garbage, and feces throughout downtown San Francisco.” While
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