Culture

Is Seattle Dying?0
- Culture
- April 3, 2019
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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You’ve Just Been Called a Bigot. Now What?0
- Culture
- April 3, 2019
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?0
- Culture
- April 3, 2019
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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Social Justice Is at Odds with American Ideas of Justice 0
- Culture
- April 2, 2019
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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Why Time Speeds Up as We Get Older (And What We Can Do About It)0
- Culture
- April 2, 2019
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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How Would Dostoevsky Have Responded to the Smartphone?0
- Culture
- April 2, 2019
“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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