“Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.” — Albert Einstein
The Dirty Secret of War: It Can Be As Compelling As It Is Ugly–“The Iliad accepts violence as a permanent factor in human life,” Knox continues, “and accepts it without sentimentality, for it is just as sentimental to pretend that war does not have its monstrous ugliness as it is to deny that it has its own strange and fatal beauty.” Literary Hub Why American...
TURN ON, TUNE IN, DROP BY THE OFFICE–Of all the drugs available, psychedelics have long been considered among the most powerful and dangerous. When Richard Nixon launched the “war on drugs” in the 1970s, the authorities claimed LSD caused people to jump out of windows and fried users’ brains. When Ronald Reagan was the governor of California, which in 1966 was...
Hurricane Harvey’s Impact — And How It Compares To Other Storms–Estimates of Harvey’s cost vary, with some predicting that the storm will be the most expensive in U.S. history at over $190 billion, surpassing Hurricane Katrina. (The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates Katrina to have cost around $160 billion.) If that ends up being the...
Single Payer Is Not a Principle–Given the ill-will and recrimination, it’s easy to forget that this is a fight among friends and allies about how best to pursue shared goals and values. Much of the internal Democratic Party debate confuses instrumental operational questions with questions of core principle. By which I mean, to put it more simply: Single payer...
The Lost Cause Rides Again–And all this must be added to a basic artistic critique—Confederate is a shockingly unoriginal idea, especially for the allegedly avant garde HBO. “What if the white South had won?” may well be the most trod-upon terrain in the field of American alternative history. There are novels about it, comic books about it, games about it, and...
The Unabomber Couldn’t Kill David Gelernter. Now Gelernter Supports Donald Trump.–Gelernter still hasn’t given up on the internet—though, like any sane person, he thinks that children shouldn’t be exposed to it too often or too much. “The average kid doesn’t even know one tenth of the books in the school library,” he scoffed. “He doesn’t need an information...
A collection of interesting reads to provoke thought and provide fodder for conversation.
A few weeks off for European travel that has basically kept me from much Internet reading, but I hope you enjoy these interesting links.
collection of interesting reads to provoke thought and provide fodder for conversation.