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Theory & political commentary
I’ve always been fond of Mother’s Day. During my childhood the holiday was all about champagne cake, frisbee and family picnics among cherry blossoms. These days it’s about raucous family brunches centered around the silkiest varieties of smoked fish. Yes, we give our mothers and mothers-in-law and ...
Members of the philosophy department at San Jose State University reacted angrily last week when they were asked to consider incorporating Harvard political theorist Michael Sandel’s online Justice course into their curriculum. In an open letter to Sandel, the San Jose State faculty members ...
I won't propose an answer to this hugely complex question today. Instead, I want to point out some striking similarities between the American perspective on the conflict in Chechnya a decade ago and the run-up to the Obama administration’s pending decision on how to handle the Assad regime’s ...
Republicans have been on the losing side of a lot of debates recently. In the past year or so, long-standing, deeply held GOP positions against gun control, same-sex marriage, higher taxes on the rich and humane immigration legislation have seen steep declines in the estimation of the public. And ...
By Zane Friedkin (guest blogger) It is beginning to look like the 21st century may indeed turn out to be the “endgame of the human race,” as Arundhati Roy predicted in 2009. There is now near-universal consensus among scientists that the threat posed by global warming is severe and that if ...
Now that the two suspects Monday’s horrific bombing have been identified, attention turns to their motive. Why would two brothers originally from the troubled region of Chechnya, a republic of Russia, detonate bombs in Boston on Patriot's Day? Here is a very raw, very quick, very preliminary ...
What motivated the perpetrators of the carnage at the Boston Marathon on Monday? Authorities are a step closer to identifying those responsible, and we may eventually learn why they decided to detonate bombs at the finish line of America’s premier road race. But the meaning of the attack goes well ...
It’s college admissions season, and with this year’s record-low admissions rates there are a lot of heartbroken high school seniors around the country who have been shut out of their top-choice campuses. The angst sometimes veers into indignation, and one Suzy Lee Weiss of Pittsburgh ...
Last year at this time, I wrote about how happy my second-grade daughter was to be going out on field trips all week while her public elementary school administered state tests to children in the older grades. This spring, a year later, my daughter is in the building for six days of tests in ...
Amid all the cheering about the advent of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), another high-tech, path-breaking model in higher education is being developed in San Francisco with the help of a $25 million seed grant. Minerva University, set to admit its first class of undergraduates in 2015, bills ...
Recent studies suggest that Americans might be the worst research subjects on the planet. As Ethan Watters put it recently, “social scientists could not possibly have picked a worse population from which to draw broad generalizations. Researchers had been doing the equivalent of studying penguins ...
Note: This is an edited version of a Praxis post originally published on December 21, 2012. The preacher in Ecclesiastes was wrong: there is something new under the sun, or at least something new on the horizon. This week, with two cases to be argued and decided by the Supreme Court, we are ...
He billed his first presidential visit to Israel as a listening tour, but it turns out Barack Obama is doing quite a bit of speaking as well. On his first day in the Holy Land, the president was all about the love: I know that in stepping foot on this land, I walk with you on the historic ...
“The owl of Minerva,” Hegel wrote, “takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering.” A year ago I launched Praxis as a forum for thinking reflectively about contemporary political challenges. The idea was to draw upon salient insights from moral and political philosophy to better ...
Last week, I looked into evidence that Americans badly misperceive the magnitude of the wealth gap in their country: the actual distribution in the United States is much more inegalitarian than we think it is. Several readers and students have asked me why I think this is the case. How could we be ...