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Blog 3 Columns

  • Jan Bloch: The man who prophesied World War I

    Jan Bloch: The man who prophesied World War I0

    Looking back on the Great War today, it feels almost inevitable. If a discontented 19-year old Bosnian Serb with the devil’s luck had not managed to put a bullet into the jugular of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand on a hot summer day in 1914, something else would have triggered the chain of events that resulted

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  • If You “Do No Harm,” Should They Leave You Alone?

    If You “Do No Harm,” Should They Leave You Alone?0

    • August 8, 2016

    The “do no harm” principle underlies many political and social arguments made over the last few decades. Essentially, its proponents believe that as long as one person doesn’t harm another, then he or she should be free to do whatever. Naturally, the thinking then extends to relationships between people as long as everyone involved consents.

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  • Can You Pass 5th Grade Science?

    Can You Pass 5th Grade Science?0

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  • The (Chilling) Reason Slaves Didn’t Revolt More Often

    The (Chilling) Reason Slaves Didn’t Revolt More Often0

    In grade school, I often naively wondered why slaves didn’t revolt more. The reasons seem fairly obvious now, of course.  Oftentimes slaves had nowhere to go, and if they did (say, to a free state in the North before the Fugitive Slave Law was passed) they had to travel a long, perilous road to get

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  • Solzhenitsyn: ‘The next war may well bury Western civilization forever’

    Solzhenitsyn: ‘The next war may well bury Western civilization forever’2

    In 1978, Alexander Solzhenitsyn was invited to give the commencement address at Harvard University. What he offered to the students and faculty some forty years ago was not your typical graduation speech filled with banal platitudes. Instead—in a perhaps unsurprising move for a Russian who spent 11 years in labor camps and exile—he offered them

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  • Skyrocketing College Costs Spur Education Alternatives

    Skyrocketing College Costs Spur Education Alternatives0

    Recently several Intellectual Takeout team members attended an appointment at a university in the Twin Cities. While walking across campus, the subject of high college costs came up. According to one member of our group, annual tuition at his alma mater has nearly doubled in the handful of years since he attended. And his experience

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  • Silence is Very Important for Our Brains

    Silence is Very Important for Our Brains0

    As the old saying goes, “Healthy body, healthy mind.” It’s become common knowledge that exercise does wonders for human beings in numerous different ways. Not only does it release endorphins, making us feel great, but it’s been seen to affect the brain in positive and sometimes unexpected ways. Now scientists are discovering that silence is one more

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  • Is ‘devouring’ books a sign of superficiality in a reader?

    Is ‘devouring’ books a sign of superficiality in a reader?0

    Last year, a reporter in the Guardian described how the Man Booker Prize judges spent ‘a summer… devouring novel after magnificent novel’, culminating in their selection of ‘a (baker’s) dozen’. This is nothing unusual. The language of eating is often used to describe reading habits. If pressed for an explanation, one might say that to

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  • Banishing the Bible

    Banishing the Bible0

    • August 5, 2016

    A headline in The Washington Post the other day caught my attention by proclaiming “Newspapers were once full of Bible quotes.” The story explained how a George Mason University professor named Lincoln Mullen has recently been going through American newspapers from the 19th and early 20th centuries and searching them for biblical quotations or references:

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