Culture

Love at First Sight: Is it Real?0
- Culture
- August 31, 2018
For a lecture course I teach at Brown University called “Love Stories,” we begin at the beginning, with love at first sight. To its detractors, love at first sight must be an illusion – the wrong term for what is simply infatuation, or a way to sugarcoat lust. Buy into it, they say, and
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Why It Matters That Teens Are Reading Less 0
- Culture
- August 30, 2018
Most of us spend much more time with digital media than we did a decade ago. But today’s teens have come of age with smartphones in their pockets. Compared to teens a couple of decades ago, the way they interact with traditional media like books and movies is fundamentally different. My co-authors and I analyzed
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Will Downton Abbey’s Gender Problem Be Solved in the 21st Century?0
- Culture
- August 30, 2018
A British aristocrat has daughters but no sons, thus his title and estate must pass to a distant male relative. It’s the classic plot device in many famous stories – ranging from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to the TV show Downton Abbey. And it’s still the law of the land in Great Britain, but
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Catholic Sex Abuse Crisis: PA AG Says He Has Evidence That Vatican Knew 0
- Culture
- August 29, 2018
Can you imagine a worse job than being in law enforcement with the duty of investigating cases of child sex abuse? How that must leave a person permanently scarred in soul and mind – and how that person must burn with a desire for justice. A few weeks ago, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro
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Adulting May Be Hard at First, but It’s So Worth It 0
- Culture
- August 29, 2018
Millennials, myself included, have a bad habit of complaining that #AdultingIsHard. A simple hashtag search of that on Twitter will get you literally thousands of results, even a few accounts with that claim as their usernames. It’s a trope so ingrained into my generation that it can be used almost anywhere. You finally graduated from
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Teacher Punishes Student… for Good Manners 4
- Culture
- August 28, 2018
Everyone expects the first week of school to contain some hiccups. Even though we all know that our children are perfect angels and would never give their teachers trouble, the transition to schedules and classmates can also contain behavior problems that mom and dad will eventually hear about. What most parents don’t expect to hear,
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