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Philosophy

  • Change Yourself, or Change the World?

    Change Yourself, or Change the World?2

    It’s a perennial philosophical question: What is the best strategy for addressing life’s problems? Change yourself, or change the world? In a clip from a few years ago that a student recently shared with me, the leftist public intellectual Slavoj Žižek offered a take that my student apparently found convincing. To judge from Žižek’s online popularity,

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  • What 3 Years Working Retail Taught Me

    What 3 Years Working Retail Taught Me2

    On a whiteboard in a communal space at my university, a student wrote this question: “If you could make one law, what would it be?” The answers, written by students from a variety of different majors, were sometimes funny. “Everyone gets free ice cream on Fridays,” one person wrote. Others were more serious and ideologically

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  • The Value of Silence: 3 Thoughts from Proverbs

    The Value of Silence: 3 Thoughts from Proverbs4

    These last few weeks have attacked me with musings on silence. It started with an anonymous quote I couldn’t shake off (“Never miss an opportunity to remain silent”) and threaded its way through my intellectual and social life. I began to see my unwarranted eagerness to speak in classroom discussions, group conversations, and even social

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  • How to Debate: What Lieutenant Columbo Teaches About Arguing

    How to Debate: What Lieutenant Columbo Teaches About Arguing2

    At age 14, I was introduced to a debate tactic I never forgot. Called the “Columbo Tactic,” this strategy allowed me to challenge any view I found even remotely illogical, all the while keeping me from having to meticulously, painstakingly articulate my own position. I first heard about this debate method in Gregory Koukl’s Tactics:

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  • Identifying the Liars and Living by Truth

    Identifying the Liars and Living by Truth2

    Among our elites—those in government, corporations, universities, the mainstream media, and the culture at large—are many who fall into three categories: the liars, the muddlers, and the dreamers of the day. The liars look straight into a camera or the eyes of an audience and boldly proclaim as truth what many listeners know to be

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  • How To Navigate Suffering With Wisdom

    How To Navigate Suffering With Wisdom3

    I have always been enamored by the book of Ecclesiastes. It is difficult to pin down precisely why this is, but it has something to do with how seemingly averse it is to the contemporary thesis that happiness is, or ought to be, the highest aspiration of the human experience. I do not subscribe to

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