Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. ~Martin Luther King Some ideas achieve longevity because they are relentlessly exposed to challenge, falsification, and disconfirmation. At the scale of nations, anti-fragile constitutions that enshrine individual freedoms, personal liberties, and legal amendment fare better than societies that prioritize the
We Must Defend Free Thought | Claire Lehmann “There is a small subset of hard-line ideologues who oppose open discourse altogether. The fact that you may not feel comfortable speaking your mind openly, and may feel afraid of serious consequences, is viewed by these people as an accomplishment.” Free Speech Matters,
A Review of Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters by Steven Pinker. Viking, 432 pages (September 28, 2021). “Academic Writes Engaging Book for the Masses.” Now there’s a shocking headline. Totally man bites dog. Oh, oh, scratch that. It’s not man bites dog
A Review of Deliberately Divided: Inside the Controversial Study of Twins and Triplets Adopted Apart by Nancy L. Segal. Rowman & Littlefield, 520 pages (November, 2021) When I first heard about the Louise Wise Services-Child Development Center (LWS-CDC) twin study, I was shocked but also skeptical. A doctor had separated
Last week, 53 top Canadian academic administrators convened in Ottawa for a biannual membership meeting of Universities Canada, a group dedicated to “providing university presidents with a unified voice for higher education.” The 89-page meeting agenda, which was leaked to me after the event, makes for an interesting read. The
A year is a long time during warfare, and the Tigray conflict that began last November has now been flipped on its head. Not many observers saw the current scenario coming. The world’s recurring tendency to forget Ethiopia, noted by the eminent 18th-century British historian Edward Gibbon, has reasserted
The Nazi concentration camp system still remains a unicum, both in its extent and its quality. At no other place or time has one seen a phenomenon so unexpected and so complex: never have so many human lives been extinguished in so short a time, and with so lucid a
Two months into my first semester as a doctoral student, Donald Trump was elected. A few years later the coronavirus hit. That summer George Floyd was murdered. Each of these events, along with many less seismic ones in between, elicited a similar response from the faculty, students, and administrators around
Fake news isn’t new. More than a century ago, newspapers owned by William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer helped stir up enthusiasm for war against Spain by hyping the dubious claim that Spanish agents had used explosives to sink the USS Maine in Havana Harbor. The cry of “Remember
The major food staples are essential to human survival. Chocolate and coffee are not essential, but try to imagine a world without them. One of the numerous concerns with climate change is that many species will lose their habitats. Scientists are projecting that, in the coming decades, this could lead
One of the biggest challenges for teachers in their quest to give good grades is that test grades tend to be very low.
As many have pointed out, the radical progressive version of social justice has all the hallmarks of a religion.
The administration, well-aware of these defamatory messages, did not refute them or even address their impropriety with the perpetrators of the misinformation.
Mental hospitals emerged at a time, Foucault argued, when the state was seeking to impose rational order on societies.