“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” wrote poet Robert Frost. In the opening line to his famous poem, “Mending Wall,” Frost explores one of the mysteries of fallen human nature. Everyone feels both a need for and an aversion to order. His questioning of the role of walls tries to explain this contradiction.
READ MOREIt’s become a running joke that Abraham Lincoln didn’t actually say half the things attributed to him. Lincoln historians will tell you this phenomenon began almost as soon as the sixteenth president’s life was claimed by John Wilkes Booth, if not before. Yet the problem has only grown more acute in the internet age. The
READ MOREA joint hearing of two House committees Thursday repeatedly turned testy as FBI agent Peter Strzok sought to explain away text messages sharply critical of Donald Trump and how they did not affect the fairness of the FBI investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Strzok, reassigned but still an FBI employee, admitted
READ MORESince the beginning of Western societies, Socrates has been the prototypical intellectual inquisitor. Perhaps the “historical Socrates” has been difficult to pin down, but two things remain consistent among various accounts of this ancient thinker: 1) his claim to possess no true knowledge, and 2) his relentless examination of the knowledge claims of others. For
READ MOREMost of us want to think for ourselves. We respect those that do and try to do so ourselves. This may be the wrong way to go about it, says Alan Jacobs, professor of humanities at Baylor University. Jacobs makes three helpful points about thought and why it is so hard to do well in
READ MORELast week, the Trump administration unveiled a proposal to privatize the United States Postal Service (USPS). The plan comes as part of a broader initiative to trim and reorganize the federal government. And given its track record of waste and inefficiency, the USPS is a great place to start cutting the fat. “USPS’s current model is unsustainable.
READ MORESome may remember the deadly book of Aristotle that plays a vital part in the plot of Umberto Eco’s 1980 novel The Name of the Rose. Poisoned by a mad Benedictine monk, the book wreaks havoc in a 14th-century Italian monastery, killing all readers who happen to lick their fingers when turning the toxic pages.
READ MOREMilton Friedman is probably the most important free-market thinker of the twentieth century. His ideas in defense of capitalism and economic freedom had an enormous influence on the shift towards free-market policies that took place from the 1970s onwards. Countries like the UK, China, Chile, or Estonia followed the economic recipes contained in best sellers
READ MOREIn his famous Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle recognizes that we human beings aim at attaining a veritable panoply of goods. This panoply includes goods as diverse as life, friends, comfortable shoes, a steak dinner, fine wine, health, the virtues, enough money to meet one’s needs, medicine when one is ill, sufficient exercise, and so forth. All
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