Good ol’ Tom Wolfe, author of The Bonfire of the Vanities, has a great description of bureaucrats and what they secretly crave in his short piece Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. If you’ve ever been at the mercy of a bureaucrat demanding the proper forms, this one will probably resonate with you. “There are those who
READ MOREA group of archeologists have recently concluded that it wasn’t just climate change that lead to the sudden disappearance of the Pueblo ancestors who used to occupy the Mesa Verde cliff-dwellings roughly 800 years ago. While historical climate change impacts are certainly relevant to our times, archeologists’ beliefs that migrants and culture clashes had a
READ MOREAs we have seen with the recent outbursts on various college campuses, it doesn’t take much these days for people to be offended. Wear a Halloween costume which references a certain culture? Offensive. Say something contrary to another person’s opinion? Offensive. But are we too easily offended and outraged these days? That’s a question Sarah
READ MOREIt may seem surprising, but until a few months ago, I had never seen the famous 1994 film “Little Women” with Christian Bale and Winona Ryder. Perhaps it was because I was viewing the film with fresh eyes that one little line jumped out and startled me. The line came near the end of the
READ MOREAristophanes, the Ancient Greek playwright, created the play Lysistrata around 400 B.C. Set against the backdrop of the Peloponnesian War between Sparta and Athens, it is the story of a woman who sets out to end the violence by starting a sex strike. According to the news this week, a woman is now setting out
READ MOREThe best way to make headlines is to swim upstream against conventional wisdom. Increasingly, however, going against conventional wisdom seems to mean a return to traditional ideas. Such is the case with actress Kirsten Dunst. According to a recent interview in Net-A-Porter fashion magazine, Dunst isn’t necessarily on board with the “find-a-feminist-boyfriend” trend. Instead, Ms.
READ MOREIn comparable terms, the entire population of the United States has watched DJ Snake’s and Lil Jon’s “Turn Down for What” music video on YouTube. In case you missed it, a man seems to have some sort of erectile dysfunction that causes him to hump everything in sight with such amazing power that he even
READ MOREEach year, Oxford Dictionaries selects one “Word of the Year” that “best reflect[s] the ethos, mood, and preoccupations” of a given year. Yesterday, Oxford announced that its selection for 2015 wasn’t a word; it was an emoji. More specifically, this emoji: Oxford justified its selection by pointing out that “Emojis are no longer the preserve of
READ MOREIt’s well-accepted fact that a good teacher is one of the most important components of a child’s education. And as some might assume, behind every good teacher is a good teachers union. But while unions might be beneficial for teachers, new evidence suggests they are not beneficial for students. Such a conclusion was reached
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