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Blog 3 Columns

  • How PC Humor Signals an Anxious Society

    How PC Humor Signals an Anxious Society0

    In my late teens I ran across a 1942 book entitled “They Loved to Laugh,” by Kathryn Worth. “What a great title,” I thought, mostly because I, too, love to laugh. There’s something so delightful about seeing the funny side of mundane life, and then letting that happiness and humor bubble up and spill over.

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  • You’ve Just Been Called a Bigot. Now What?

    You’ve Just Been Called a Bigot. Now What?0

    So you have just been accused of being a bigot of some kind—you’re a racist, a sexist, a homophobe, a xenophobe, or some other horrible-sounding name. Don’t fool yourself. Everyone is a potential target. Anyone can be called out. Forget intersectionality. African-Americans, women, LGBTQ, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and all manner of foreign nationals have

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  • White Privilege: A Thing of the Past?

    White Privilege: A Thing of the Past?0

    White privilege. For years now, we’ve heard some folks sling that term around along with that verbal slap, “Check your privilege.” But here’s a question: Does white privilege exist in 2019? Or is it just a way of smearing whites? First, a definition of white privilege. The online Cambridge Dictionary defines white privilege as “the

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  • Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Zizek Are Going to Debate Marxism and Capitalism. What Should We Expect?

    Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Zizek Are Going to Debate Marxism and Capitalism. What Should We Expect?0

    At Toronto’s Sony Center on April 19, Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Zizek will debate “Happiness: Capitalism vs. Marxism.” It’s a rather strange umbrella subject both for the Canadian psychologist and the Slovenian philosopher. In several viral YouTube videos, Peterson has made it clear that suffering, not happiness, is the primary human condition, while in Zizek’s

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  • Is Seattle Dying?

    Is Seattle Dying?0

    A local news documentary about Seattle’s rampant homelessness and drug-abuse crisis has touched a nerve with the city’s residents, many of whom say they are frustrated with the inability of the courts and local officials to deal with the problem. In “Seattle is Dying,” an hour-long special that ran on Seattle’s ABC-affiliated KOMO News station

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  • How the Minimum Wage Affected Workers During (and After) the Great Recession

    How the Minimum Wage Affected Workers During (and After) the Great Recession0

    The law of demand is one of the most fundamental concepts of economics. This law states that, if all other factors remain equal, the higher the price of a good, the less people will demand that good. Most of the time this is too obvious to mention. Yet people seem to think we can suspend

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  • Why Time Speeds Up as We Get Older (And What We Can Do About It)

    Why Time Speeds Up as We Get Older (And What We Can Do About It)0

    Time seems to go faster as we age. When we were children, the school year and then the summer seemed to stretch forever. As adults, we wonder where the time went. Duke University engineering professor Adrian Bejan believes he can explain this universal phenomenon. Bejan found as we age our ability to process mental images

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  • Social Justice Is at Odds with American Ideas of Justice

    Social Justice Is at Odds with American Ideas of Justice0

    What is justice? This complicated question is the subject of much study by philosophers, lawyers, clergy, and laymen. It is often easier to determine the metes and bounds of justice from what it is not than to define what it is in the abstract. Unfair procedures, treating the rich differently from the poor, racial discrimination,

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  • How Would Dostoevsky Have Responded to the Smartphone?

    How Would Dostoevsky Have Responded to the Smartphone?0

    “I don’t know how to make friends without my phone,” a teenager told me last summer when I found myself enforcing a policy banning screens at a student seminar I was helping with. I was a little surprised by this line of reasoning, but I’ve encountered it more than a few times since from teens

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