Respect is (1) an alternative to tolerance and (2) the better one. It is an alternative because it concerns the same issue: how to live with fellow humans who appear to be identically constituted in their need to formulate opinions and to assert them in speech (not always in that order) but disparately developed in
READ MOREIf too much socialization wears you out, it might be because you’re smart. That’s the interesting revelation uncovered in new research by evolutionary psychologists Satoshi Kanazawa and Norman Li, as reported in the Washington Post. Unsurprisingly, Kanazawa and Li found the following correlations in a national survey of 15,000 people they conducted: The higher the
READ MOREOn March 19, 2000, The Simpsons alluded to a future Donald Trump presidency in an episode titled “Bart to the Future.” Newsday puts it thus: “Bart sees his future in a vision where his band plays a gig for popcorn shrimp and Lisa becomes the first ‘straight female’ president of the United States. In a clip
READ MOREIn a recent article for The Chronicle of Higher Education Rob Jenkins asks, “Why Are Some Academics So Unprofessional?”. One might well ask the same about any other profession, of course; doubtless many of you could give examples. But it does seem worse in academia, and that suggests a lesson both important and easily absorbed.
READ MOREQuestion: How many historians does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: There is a great deal of debate on this issue. Up until the mid-20th century, the accepted answer was ‘one’: and this Whiggish narrative underpinned a number of works that celebrated electrification and the march of progress in light-bulb changing. Beginning in
READ MOREIf you’ve visited Ford’s Theatre, you’ve likely seen the 34-foot tower of books on Abraham Lincoln. The tower, designed to symbolize that the final word on America’s 16th president will never be written, was constructed with some 6,800 books – just a fraction of the 15,000 titles written on Lincoln. (An admitted Lincolnphile, my personal
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