Going to class rarely makes me feel tense, but this time—sitting in an upper-level writing ethics course—I was scared to speak up. My class was discussing cultural appropriation: whether it was right for majority-race authors to take on minority-race perspectives in their work. My classmates were almost universally against the idea, saying that a person
READ MOREImagine a zombie. What does your zombie look like? How does it move? What does it eat? How does it spend its day? What if any hobbies does it have? More likely than not, you probably pictured a zombie of the George A. Romero variety: a slow-moving reanimated corpse that feasts on the flesh of
READ MOREThey say the road to success is made by walking. For kids, that is literally true. Turns out that the more kids walk around, the more upward mobility they enjoy as adults, concluded a study in American Psychologist. The researchers, led by Shigehiro Oishi, wondered why there are such “large regional differences in upward social
READ MOREAleksandr Solzhenitsyn was the most important Soviet dissident, but his message was accessible to all. On the day before he was sent into exile in 1974, he published a short essay entitled “Live Not By Lies.” It only takes him a few pages to lay out the most effective strategy for resisting totalitarianism. As Solzhenitsyn
READ MOREMost countries – even in the developing world – are entering an era of ageing and population decline. With fewer and fewer babies and more and more elderly, what does the future look like? According to Shamil Ismail, a South African investment analysist, it looks very grim. In his book The Age of Decay: How Aging
READ MORETensions about the Israel-Palestine conflict came to a head on many college campuses last spring. Tents arrived as students camped out for days, sometimes weeks. Some protests were disbanded through peaceful negotiation with administrators, while others were broken up by riot police, including at my own school. The result has been anything but peaceful. Students
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