Last week we discussed the words of psychologist Jean Twenge, who declared that the rise of depression and anxiety in Americans is a result of communal and familial decline, as well as an intensified focus on money, fame, and image. While these are logical and likely culprits, Dr. Peter Gray believes there is another factor
READ MOREIt has been quite a month for St. Paul’s Como Park High School. On March 10, Intellectual Takeout shared with readers a video depicting two youths beating up a teacher, later identified as Mark Rawlings, a 48-year-old technology teacher at Como High. It turns out that the same day Rawlings was thrashed by the two
READ MORERespect is (1) an alternative to tolerance and (2) the better one. It is an alternative because it concerns the same issue: how to live with fellow humans who appear to be identically constituted in their need to formulate opinions and to assert them in speech (not always in that order) but disparately developed in
READ MOREIf you’re like me, you’ve probably had a chuckle now and then over little girls who run around with pink gowns with a tiara topping their tousled hair. But as author Jerramy Fine explains, the princess persona has been much maligned in a culture which discourages “girly” femininity, and instead encourages girls to do everything
READ MOREWords are powerful. In the case of the word holocaust, we tend to think of it solely in reference to the Nazis’ attempt to eliminate all Jews in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s through mass shootings, concentration camps, and eventually gas extermination followed by mass graves and crematorium. But the word was actually in
READ MOREIf too much socialization wears you out, it might be because you’re smart. That’s the interesting revelation uncovered in new research by evolutionary psychologists Satoshi Kanazawa and Norman Li, as reported in the Washington Post. Unsurprisingly, Kanazawa and Li found the following correlations in a national survey of 15,000 people they conducted: The higher the
READ MOREThe unearthing of a pregnant, 68 million year-old Tyrannosaurus rex in Montana reportedly has the potential to yield the holy grail of paleontological discoveries: T-Rex DNA. The specimen, says North Carolina State University paleontologist Lindsay Zanno, contains medullary bone, a tissue that develops only in pregnant females near the creature’s egg-laying phase. The presence of
READ MOREIn many secular contexts today, it’s considered a virtue for people to “be humble.” But should that be the case? Apart from a religious context, does it really make sense for people to cultivate humility? The background for this question is the idea that—if we care about being rational human beings—moral attitudes need to be
READ MOREMarch 21st marks the birthday of one of the greatest composers of all time: Johann Sebastian Bach. Beyond being a great composer, Bach was also a great teacher who raised many pupils to be masters of their craft. According to Bach’s first biographer, Johann Nikolaus Forkel, Bach’s success as a teacher resulted in part from
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