
The other day a friend of mine was describing a video clip of a student debate he had seen online. According to my friend, the video showed a student who was clearly trying to make a logical argument, but was grasping at straws and clueless on how to debate in a rational manner. Such a
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The Washington Post last week published a story about a unique initiative in Albuquerque that puts panhandlers to work. There’s a Better Way, a program initiated by the Mayor Richard Berry, offers $9 an hour (plus free lunch) to panhandlers who are dispatched around the city on beautification projects. The results, so far, look pretty good. Via
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In 2011, only 27 percent of the nation’s high school seniors were deemed to be proficient in writing. According to information recently revealed by The Washington Post’s Jay Mathews, those numbers will likely not be improving any time soon. In dissecting an Education Trust report on the state of America’s classrooms, Mathews highlighted some “depressing
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Young people, it seems, increasingly regard the word “masculine” with derision. Based on the findings of a recent study, one wonders if such attitudes could stem from some latent insecurities. Via the Washington Post: Researchers measured the grip strength (how strongly you can squeeze something) and pinch strength (how strongly you can pinch something between two fingers) of 237
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Two hundred years ago, there arrived in London the first group of Muslims ever to study in Europe. Dispatched by the Crown Prince of Iran, their mission was to survey the new sciences emerging from the industrial revolution. As the six young Muslims settled into their London lodgings in the last months of 1815, they
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In the 1990s, a psychologist named Martin Seligman led the positive psychology movement, which placed the study of human happiness squarely at the center of psychology research and theory. It continued a trend that began in the 1960s with humanistic and existential psychology, which emphasized the importance of reaching one’s innate potential and creating meaning
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