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Liberty Depends on ‘Civil Society’0
- Politics
- February 3, 2016
Among the relatively few college students exposed to it, the concept of “civil society” often puts them to sleep. It’s not exciting for people to hear that “civil society” refers to all those “mediating institutions” (another snoozer) between government and the individual, such as family, church, voluntary associations, and charitable organizations. American political debates today
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Parents Are Paying $180/Hr for THIS?!?0
- Education
- February 3, 2016
“Executive function” training is apparently the latest “it” thing to improve student performance, and parents are shelling out the big bucks for it. What is it? According to NPR, executive function tutors work with students to improve organization and judgment skills such as “attention and focus, working memory, impulse control and self-evaluation.” In the NPR
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Harvard Professor: Discrimination Not the Cause of ‘Gender Pay Gap’0
- Culture
- February 3, 2016
During the last seven years, the Obama presidency has faithfully recognized “Equal Pay Day,” the date on which “we mark how far into the new year women would have to work just to earn the same as men did in the previous year.” According to President Obama, the fact that “women earn 78 cents for
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Repeating the Original Sin 0
- February 3, 2016
Even if you’re not religious, you should know your religious mythology. As many of the great thinkers of the past recognized, the mythological stories offered (or expressed) important archetypes for understanding our present world. For instance, in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche interprets human life as a struggle between the Apollonian (rational) and Dionysian (irrational)
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What They’re Reading in Ivy League Schools 0
- Culture
- February 3, 2016
We’re big proponents of self-education at Intellectual Takeout. So when today’s Washington Post claimed there was a new way to get an expensive Ivy League education without paying tuition, I eagerly bit. According to The Post, the way to this inexpensive education is through the Open Syllabus Explorer, which is “an online database of books assigned
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These 12 Simone Weil Quotes Are Genius!!!0
- February 3, 2016
The French philosopher Simone Weil (1909-1943) only lived to the age of 34. But in spite of her brief life she created a body of work that has garnered some impressive compliments. Albert Camus described her as “the only great spirit of our time.” T.S. Eliot wrote that she was “a woman of genius, of
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