Like millions of other Americans over Thanksgiving weekend, I went to see Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece, Lincoln. I was mesmerized by Daniel Day-Lewis’s portrayal of the great statesman. I was also […]
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By Zane Friedkin (guest blogger) The drone war being waged by the Obama administration in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, and Somalia has elicited more media attention than is typical of […]
The best case against drone warfare as it is being waged lies in the fact that the campaign is being conducted in secret, shrouded from public view, unguided by any clear standards and immune from oversight.
Arguments on both sides of this question were aired at a thought-provoking colloquium sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College on September 21-22: “Does the President Matter? A […]
Mitt Romney, the candidate who has made a career out of shifting his positions to suit the political climate and maximize his electoral prospects, may have gone too far with […]
Mitt Romney dug himself a deep hole this week when Mother Jones released a secretly recorded video of him speaking to a group of millionaires and complaining that 47 percent […]
Many think Justice Anthony Kennedy will cast the decisive vote ending affirmative action as we know it.
Sometime in 1952, the American experimental musician John Cage put the finishing touches on a composition that challenged the definition of music. It was a three-part movement written for any […]
What’s the Big Idea? Isaac Newton defined the optical spectrum, but it was Goethe who first understood that color is more than just a physical problem. In Theory of Colours (1840), the German […]
Mitt Romney addresses the nation at the Republican National Convention on Thursday night. How well have his warm-up acts set the stage for his big speech? I’ll assess the four […]
In the avalanche of analysis and speculation about Chief Justice Roberts’ stunning decision to side with the Supreme Court’s liberal wing to uphold Obama’s healthcare law, one strain paints Roberts […]
A new meme is emerging in the blogosphere: Obama as the “imperial president.” From the left, Tom Egelhardt claims Obama “has the powers previously associated with the gods” while Steve […]
There are many ways to look at Europe other than as a collection of nation-states. Plenty of other imagined communities lurk beneath the surface of the standard political map. Check […]
I’m always fascinated by pop culture products that become cultural catalysts. More specifically, I’m particularly interested in foreign exports that are so interesting, exciting, addictive or just plain weird that […]
Mitt Romney’s plan for education, released last week, sounds a number of predictable conservative themes: union bashing, continued reliance on standardized testing, expansion of charter schools and reform or elimination of […]
President Obama apparently thinks the safer way to justify higher taxes on the super rich is to pitch the proposal based on its deficit-reduction potential. But if he wants to get the ball rolling for meaningful tax reform, Obama will summon his rhetorical powers to explain how the Buffett Rule could help reduce the nation’s massive and destructive wealth inequality.
Christian Lorentzen makes an excellent point excellently: Tougher for the novelist are the tasks of rendering convincing characters across the class spectrum and capturing economic intricacies in a way that’s […]
The weekend is a good time to get some culture, and since there are a lot of things lately that I’m enjoying, I figured I’d write one completely miscellaneous post […]
Environmental groups and climate activists have been harshly critical of Mitt Romney’s unfortunate backtracking on climate science and his commitment to policy action. Much of the criticism has argued that […]
The regime of standardized testing in the nation’s public schools is expanding. Soon, children as young as 5 will devote weeks of the school year to preparing and sitting for multiple-choice exams. What is a parent to do?
Now this is what I call post-romantic. It begins with a fascinating vanguard of “neuromarketing” researchers. These scientist-marketers hook up subjects (consumers) to new biometric technologies such as EEG headsets […]
Do stubborn people actually win? Maybe the reason they take such an aggressive approach every time is that it works, says Steven Pinker.
As the times go, so goes Van Gogh. Toiling in relative obscurity during his life, known by fellow painters but not by the public at large, Vincent Van Gogh’s greatest […]
“All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up,” says washed-up silent film star Norma Desmond in the final scene of Billy Wilder’s unforgettable 1950 film Sunset Boulevard. Gloria Swanson […]
Continuing a tradition I started last year, here’s a very personal, very subjective, “I can’t read everything, so I probably left out something, so mention it in the comments, OK?” […]
Over the past decade, there has been an explosion of research from the social and behavioral sciences offering insight on how individuals, social groups and political systems come to understand […]
Today we will take a few minutes to show a little appreciation for an important right in Western society – the right to divorce. It is important to celebrate this […]
Every art lover knows the story. Sad, mad Vincent Van Gogh went into the wheat fields of Auvers-sur-Oise on the morning of July 27, 1890 to paint Wheatfield with Crows […]
These posts got the most web traffic on my two blogs in October 2010: Dangerously Irrelevant Videos – I hate my teacher 12 videos to spark educators’ thinking We can’t […]
As we argue in our Framing Science thesis, in order to engage a religiously diverse public on pressing problems like climate change, it’s important to offer positive and personally meaningful […]