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Blog 3 Columns

  • Philosopher Roger Scruton on ‘The Virtue of Irrelevance’

    Philosopher Roger Scruton on ‘The Virtue of Irrelevance’0

    Have you ever glanced through your child’s homework and noticed… well… just how focused it is on the present? Whether it be a reading assignment, or a math problem, or even a science experiment, much of today’s curriculum seems to tie into some modern, social justice-minded issue. Meanwhile, the more classic elements of education, such

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  • Monogamy isn’t Natural. But is it Good?

    Monogamy isn’t Natural. But is it Good?0

    In a recent interview (linking to Vanity Fair instead of Playboy), Scarlett Johansson discussed a variety of topics: Broadway, her career, the craft of film-making, and her split from husband Romain Dauriac. It will be the second failed marriage for Johansson, who is not yet 33. So it’s no surprise she sounded a little down on

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  • Feminine Beauty that Endures the Ages

    Feminine Beauty that Endures the Ages0

    In London, the National Portrait Gallery has opened a major exhibition made up of images of Audrey Hepburn, called “Portraits of an Icon”. And as noted by this article in The Conversation, it portrays a world of difference from the celebrity status that currently exists. What is it about women like Audrey Hepburn and Grace

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  • E.B. White’s Touching Letter to Man Who Lost Hope in Humanity

    E.B. White’s Touching Letter to Man Who Lost Hope in Humanity0

    I’m a longtime fan of E.B. White. Intellectual Takeout readers likely know he wrote a lot more than just Charlotte’s Web. His short story The Door is one of my favorite short stories. (We’ll deconstruct that one another other day; as you can see, it’s quite mad.) I bring up White because an old friend

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  • Delta Paid for Its Own Security Upgrade and Solved All its Problems

    Delta Paid for Its Own Security Upgrade and Solved All its Problems0

    The security lines at the Atlanta airport had grown progressively worse. The lines grew longer, the crowds ever more unruly, the invasiveness of the process ever more intense, the mood of the TSA more crabby and scary. Customers were miserable. It had been getting more terrible all the time, unsustainably so. Those of us who

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  • Dear Professor Tirrell: Speech isn’t Toxic, People Are

    Dear Professor Tirrell: Speech isn’t Toxic, People Are0

    In Jean-Paul Sartre’s play “No Exit,” the character Joseph Garcin concludes that torture and other forms of physical punishment pale in comparison to the torment of poor company. So he pronounces that “Hell is other people.” The same cynical view overcomes me when intelligent people theorize about the harm caused by offensive speech. Lynne Tirrell,

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  • Anti-Homework Trend: Freeing Kids from a Culture of Dependency?

    Anti-Homework Trend: Freeing Kids from a Culture of Dependency?0

    Late last summer, Texas teacher Brandy Young made internet waves when she sent a note about homework to the parents of her students. Instead of the normal spend-30-minutes-a-day-on-homework command that parents normally hear, Mrs. Young’s note informed them that she would not be giving homework at all. Instead, she asked families to spend more time

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  • The Death of Outdoor Recess

    The Death of Outdoor Recess0

    A mom in New York tells me she’s in a fight with her kid’s preschool. You might think she’s unhappy with the zero-tolerance policy for Kombucha? Too much enrichment? Not enough? In fact, it’s none of the above. Her fight is over the children playing outside. The mother wants her kid to be outside more

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  • Lincoln’s Suicide Note

    Lincoln’s Suicide Note0

    The depths of Abraham Lincoln’s misery following the death of fiancée Ann Rutledge is well known. (Lincoln’s close friend Josh Speed provided a detailed and captivating recollection of the Lincoln-Rutledge courtship, an unlikely romance that was nothing short of Shakespearean in both beauty and tragedy.) Lincoln was remarkably frank and open about his persistent “melancholy”, which

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