
“Forget death and seek life!” With these encouraging words, Gilgamesh, the star of the eponymous 4000-year-old epic poem, coins the world’s first heroic catchphrase. At the same time, the young king encapsulates the considerations of mortality and humanity that lie at the heart of the world’s most ancient epic. While much has changed since, the
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In case you missed it, Emma Watson made history Sunday, winning MTV’s first gender-neutral acting award. So what does that mean? Unless I’m missing something, it appears that MTV just lumped male and female actors into a single category, giving out a single award for the best acting performance. That doesn’t seem like that big
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America’s public schools are getting worse, and part of the reason why is that they have taken on too much responsibility. This point was made by the famous historian Jacques Barzun in his preface to his 1983 book Teacher in America: “There [in public schools], instead of initiatives to develop native intelligence and give it
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The recent Vanity Fair article detailing the more lurid underbelly of online dating—the barrage of dick pics, the endless swiping, the death of romance—was grim, if not horrific. Dating, Vanity Fair would have you believe, is evolving into an elaborate charade of deception: Everybody is petrified of giving someone the “wrong idea.” Men are impolite
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If Galileo or da Vinci, the famed Italian polymaths, lived in modern day Oregon, they might well be the targets of a lengthy and expensive inquisition by the Oregon State Board of Examiners for Engineering and Land Surveying for the unlicensed practice of engineering for engaging in mathematical criticism. That is because neither became state-licensed
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In the years when I spent a good deal of time sitting beside the piano, coaching kids of all ages to count, to curve their fingers, and to phrase their music properly, I heard a common refrain over and over. That refrain was often uttered by the parent of the child, and went something like
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