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Blog 3 Columns

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Blog 3 Columns

The Myth of American Meritocracy 0
- Culture
- March 15, 2019
The most destructive and pervasive myth in America today is that we live in a meritocracy. Our elites, so the myth goes, earned their places at Yale and Harvard, on Wall Street and in Washington—not because of the accident of their birth, but because they are better, stronger, and smarter than the rest of us. Therefore, they
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The Most Intolerant County in America (and the Most Tolerant City)0
- Culture
- March 15, 2019
The Atlantic recently asked PredictWise, an analytics firm, to rank US counties based on partisan prejudice (“affective polarization”). The results are now in, and they are fascinating. [Editor’s note: Image shown below] The most intolerant country was not Rabun County in northeastern Georgia, where the film Deliverance was shot. Nor was it in Albany County,
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Questions, But No Answer 0
- Culture
- March 15, 2019
Questions about various events, propositions, and ideas in our culture and politics have me bemused, baffled, and bewildered. As a young woman in Tennessee once said when I asked for directions, “Well, I am just plain bumfuzzled.” Bumfuzzled. That’s it exactly. My inquiries below may strike readers as intended to provoke, but provocation is the
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How to Make America Smart Again 0
- March 15, 2019
Over the past week America has been fascinated and appalled by the latest college admissions cheating scandal. Much of the attention has been focused on the bribing of coaches to get kids into school with fake athletic credentials. But the even more absurd part of the scandal is that parents were paying between $15,000 and $75,000
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Former Navy SEAL Suggests 3 Reasons Young People Are Buying into Socialism 0
- Culture
- March 15, 2019
Recently Texas congressman and general uber-mensch Dan Crenshaw made an appearance on a Sunday talk show. After arm-wrestling and talking for a long time about the former Navy SEAL’s own journey in politics, Crenshaw was questioned on why so many of today’s young people are going all-in on the “democratic socialism” touted by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie
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Three-Quarters of Parents ‘Adulting’ for Their Grown Children 0
- Culture
- March 14, 2019
I ran across a fascinating little chart in the New York Times the other day. It described the percentage of parents who take on responsibilities that their adult children should be doing. Some of the more unbelievable ones include wake-up calls (15 percent), contacting a child’s employer (11 percent), and contacting a professor to discuss
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How Storytelling Could Revitalize U.S. History Scores 1
- Culture
- March 14, 2019
Whatever I teach, I teach storytelling because it is an expression of human creativity that provides perspective. Stories help us understand our world by showing us that random events surrounding our lives only seem random, but are in fact connected. Stories enable us to perceive a higher level of meaning. Fiction such as J.R.R. Tolkien’s The
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Class Struggle and the End of Identity Politics 0
- Culture
- March 14, 2019
As the Democratic party in the United States gears up for the 2020 presidential campaign, and a host of candidates announce their entry into the fray, some have observed a (class?) struggle between what might be called the Old Left (the sort of democratic socialism associated with Bernie Sanders) and the New Left (the identity
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7 Ways to Find Truth in a Clickbait World 0
- Culture
- March 14, 2019
Whether it’s the hype about the MoMo Challenge, the Jussie Smollett hate-crime hoax, the Fyre Festival swindle, or politicians scaring us to blazes about this or that emergency, it’s hard to distinguish fact from fiction and prudent ideas from rash action. We live in a time when too much of our news resembles something
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