Once upon a time in the United States, people referred to something called “Culture with a big C.” It turned around the notion of a communally shared appreciation of the noble arts: music, painting, literature, architecture, cinema and other fields of creative production, including philosophy,...
The economization of every aspect of life in today’s consumer society has had a particularly pernicious influence on public education. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, society saddled education with the task of infusing respectable knowledge in young people’s heads. Politicians...
The global health crisis has led to an increase in going out cashless due to fears of transmission of the coronavirus. Yet this has had an adverse impact on social and economic inclusion. It has also exacerbated the so-called “digital divide” over who has access to the internet and can buy...
On the final day of the recently concluded Olympic Games in Tokyo, World Athletics President Sebastian Coe warned that climate change will adversely impact the regular schedule and timing of major sporting events. This warning came amid increasing concerns that extreme weather conditions and harsh...
Richard Hanania is a political scientist and author not nearly as famous as Steven Pinker, whose ambition as a public intellectual has taken him well beyond the banalities of his initial field of study: human cognition and language. Even before the official end of America’s “forever wars,”...
In the spring of 2020, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden affirmed what his policy concerning the Iran nuclear deal would be if elected: “I would rejoin the agreement and use our renewed commitment to diplomacy to work with our allies to strengthen and extend it.” After eight months...
Before the landmark 1973 US Supreme Court decision in Roe v Wade that protected a woman’s right to choose to terminate a pregnancy without government intervention, many women found themselves in a desperate position. If a woman, especially a low-income woman, wanted an abortion, she often had to...
Friedberg is an inconspicuous town with roughly 30,000 inhabitants in a rural district in the middle of Germany. It lies at the hinge of the metropolitan region of Frankfurt/Rhein-Main, where the European Central Bank is headquartered. In recent years, this town where urban and rural life collides...
When Oprah Winfrey tells people, "I am here to ask you to think seriously,” apparently they do. She really did say this, in 2007, and her audience duly thought about who was the best person for the US presidency. It was Barack Obama, America’s first black president. Oprah was, and remains, one...
A creative British judge has demonstrated how judgments in criminal cases need not be about meting out humiliating, painful punishment to the guilty. In the case of 21-year-old Ben John, accused of acts identifying him as a “terror risk,” the punishment prescribed by Judge Timothy Spencer QC...
In Washoe County, Nevada, parents protest critical race theory (CRT), while a conservative group is pushing for teachers to wear body cameras to make sure they aren’t indoctrinating students. In Loudon county, Virginia, home to Leesburg, a town named after Confederate General Robert E. Lee,...
