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Are We Living In a Dystopia?0
- Culture
- April 29, 2020
Dystopian fiction is hot. Sales of George Orwell’s “1984” and Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” have skyrocketed since 2016. Young adult dystopias – for example, Suzanne Collins’ “The Hunger Games,” Veronica Roth’s “Divergent,” Lois Lowry’s classic, “The Giver” – were best-sellers even before. And with COVID-19, dystopias featuring diseases have taken on new life. Netflix
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The Madness of Competing COVID-19 Projections 0
- Politics
- April 29, 2020
As we think about the influence of computerized epidemiological models on our lives these days, we might think back to the old joke, “If you’re a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail.” The hammer, of course, is big data, and we humans are the nails. That is, since we’ve created a digital layer
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COVID-19 Lockdowns May Destroy Our Immune Systems 0
- Culture
- April 29, 2020
What happens when trees are planted in a “perfect” growing environment? Give the trees rich soil, just the right amount of water and no wind, and they grow rapidly, but topple over before they reach maturation. Wind stimulates the tree to grow stress wood, which “helps a tree position itself for optimal sun absorption, and it
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Dissent Drives the Advancement of Society 0
- Culture
- April 29, 2020
Tolerance is the virtue of the 21st century. Because of this, we’ve seen a new clamor regarding certain opinions viewed as intolerable in America’s political discourse. What makes for a tolerable opinion? That’s hard to say. Yet the arbitrary standards are quickly enacted by certain gatekeepers as soon as someone expresses an opinion deemed too uncouth for our
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The Myth That Americans Were Poorly Educated Before Mass Schooling 0
- Culture
- April 29, 2020
Parents the world over are dealing with massive adjustments in their children’s education that they could not have anticipated just three months ago. To one degree or another, pandemic-induced school closures are creating the “mass homeschooling” that FEE’s senior education fellow Kerry McDonald predicted two months ago. Who knows, with millions of youngsters absent from
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Decentralization Is Gaining Popularity During COVID-19 0
- Economics
- April 28, 2020
In the increasingly polarized America, Black Swan moments like the COVID-19 pandemic have further confirmed growing divides in the country. Our textbooks would like us to believe that emergencies create fertile grounds for unity. But when you have a populace that is politically dividing itself even when it comes to the TV shows it watches,
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