Garrison Keillor: Done. Over. He’s here. Goodbye.

So he won. The nation takes a deep breath. Raw ego and proud illiteracy have won out and a severely learning-disabled man with a real character problem will be president. We are so exhausted from thinking about this election, millions of people will take up leaf-raking and garage cleaning with intense pleasure.

[…]‌

The Trumpers never expected their guy to actually win the thing, and that’s their … [ Read more ]

Author: Garrison Keillor
Source: The Washington Post (November 9, 2016)
Subjects: Excerpts, Politics & Public Policy, Trump

Best Business Books 2016: Economy

It’s unappreciated that for much of history, growth in economic frontiers — what we would call development markets — was actually quite low. The era of modern economic growth got started only in 1870, with the simultaneous advent of the iron-hulled screw-propelled oceangoing steamship, the submarine telegraph cable, and the industrial research lab. It was then that the pace of growth kicked up a notch … [ Read more ]

Author: J. Bradford DeLong
Source: strategy+business (Winter2016)
Subjects: Economics | Economy, Excerpts, History

How Hannah Arendt’s Classic Work on Totalitarianism Illuminates Today’s America

Freedom is fragile, and when demagogues speak, and others start following them, it is wise to pay attention.

[…]‌

The political party system, and parliamentary government more generally, were regarded as corrupt and oligarchic. Such an environment was fertile ground for a “mob mentality,” in which outsiders — Jews, Roma, Slavs, gays, “cosmopolitan intellectuals” — could be scapegoated and a savior could be craved: “The mob always … [ Read more ]

Author: Jeffrey C. Isaac
Source: The Washington Post (December 17, 2016)
Subjects: Excerpts, Politics & Public Policy

The Future World Order

Theories of international relations
Of the large range of theories that have emerged on how states get along with each other, or not as the case may be, I will draw, in simplified terms, on two leading schools today: liberalism and structural realism.

  1. Liberalism
    The basic notion in liberalism is that conflict tends to occur where states have diverging interests. Where these interests are non-trivial, sometimes such

… [ Read more ]

Author: Michael A. Witt
Source: Insead Knowledge (January 2, 2017)
Subjects: Excerpts, Foreign Policy, History, International, Military | War | Peace, Politics & Public Policy, Sociology | Anthropology

The Greatest Commencement Address of All Time: Joseph Brodsky’s Six Rules for Playing the Game of Life Like a Winner

On December 18, 1988, twenty-five years after his writing had been denounced as “anti-Soviet” in his native Russia and mere months after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature “for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity,” prolific poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky (May 24, 1940–January 28, 1996) took the podium at Ann Arbor and addressed the graduating class at the University … [ Read more ]

Authors: Joseph Brodsky, Maria Popova
Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (December 18, 2013)
Subjects: Advice, Articles & Links, Excerpts, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Wisdom

What Women Really Think of Men

As Ruth Bader Ginsburg, quoting a California judicial opinion, told the Supreme Court in 1971, “the pedestal upon which women have been placed has all too often, upon closer inspection, been revealed as a cage.” When we declare that men will always be brutes and women can only shrug from on high, we engage in what President George W. Bush once called the soft bigotry … [ Read more ]

Author: Irin Carmon
Source: The New York Times (December 9, 2016)
Subjects: Excerpts, Feminism, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior

Democracy from the Mob Mentality That Masquerades for It

When a society has shed its crutches of inequality in a relatively short period — from finally recognizing the dignity of all love with marriage equality to finally taking stock of a generations-old wound with Black Lives Matter — vast swaths of the population are perhaps bound to find the rate of change intolerable, bound to find themselves tossed into a brave new world that … [ Read more ]

Authors: H.L. Mencken, Maria Popova
Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (November 11, 2016)
Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Life & Society, Perception | Observation, Politics & Public Policy

Theodore Roosevelt On Citizenship

Here is a small treasury of excerpts from some of the addresses Theodore Roosevelt gave during his lifetime. When you look at anthologies of all his speeches, you find that the themes he hits in these selections were the ones he offered, with only slight alterations, over and over and over again, in every town and city he visited on country-crossing whistle stop tours. You’ll … [ Read more ]

Authors: Brett McKay, Kate McKay, Theodore Roosevelt
Source: The Art of Manliness (November 7, 2016)
Subjects: America, Articles & Links, Excerpts, History, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy

Noam Chomsky: ‘The Republican Party Has Become the Most Dangerous Organization in World History’

Some years ago, public intellectual Noam Chomsky warned that the political climate in the U.S. was ripe for the rise of an authoritarian figure. Now, he shares his thoughts on the aftermath of this election, the moribund state of the U.S. political system and why Trump is a real threat to the world and the planet in general.

Authors: C.J. Polychroniou, Noam Chomsky
Source: EcoWatch (November 14, 2016)
Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Politics & Public Policy, Trump

Why War: Einstein and Freud’s Little-Known Correspondence on Violence, Peace, and Human Nature

Despite his enormous contributions to science, Albert Einstein was no reclusive genius, his ever-eager conversations and correspondence engaging such diverse partners as the Indian philosopher Tagore and a young South African girl who wanted to be a scientist. In 1931, the Institute for Intellectual Cooperation invited the renowned physicist to a cross-disciplinary exchange of ideas about politics and peace with a thinker of his choosing. … [ Read more ]

Authors: Albert Einstein, Maria Popova, Sigmund Freud
Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (May 6, 2013)
Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Military | War | Peace, Psychology | Behavior, Sociology | Anthropology

Why We Hurt Each Other: Tolstoy’s Letters to Gandhi on Love, Violence, and the Truth of the Human Spirit

In 1908, Indian revolutionary Taraknath Das wrote to Leo Tolstoy, by then one of the most famous public figures in the world, asking for the author’s support in India’s independence from British colonial rule. On December 14, Tolstoy, who had spent the last twenty years seeking the answers to life’s greatest moral questions, was moved to reply in a long letter, which Das published in … [ Read more ]

Author: Leo Tolstoy
Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (August 21, 2014)
Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Freedom | Liberty, History, Life & Society, Love, Sociology | Anthropology

How Social Media Endangers Knowledge

[The] trend toward rationality and enlightenment was endangered long before the advent of the Internet. As Neil Postman noted in his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, the rise of television introduced not just a new medium but a new discourse: a gradual shift from a typographic culture to a photographic one, which in turn meant a shift from rationality to emotions, exposition to entertainment. … [ Read more ]

Author: Hossein Derakhshan
Source: WIRED (October 19, 2017)
Subjects: Articles & Links, Communication, Culture, Excerpts, Intelligence | Knowledge, Life & Society, Sociology | Anthropology

Immigrating to Obesity

Description:
THE SOURCE: “Immigration and the American Obesity Epidemic” by Lingxin Hao and Julie J. H. Kim, in International Migration Review, Summer 2009.

Excerpt:
The average immigrant is slimmer than the average native-born American and stays that way for some 10 years after coming to the United States.

The typical native-born American male, 5’8″ tall, weighs 187 pounds. This makes him officially seriously overweight, according to the Centers … [ Read more ]

Authors: Julie J. H. Kim, Lingxin Hao
Source: The Wilson Quarterly (Autumn2009)
Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Health & Medicine, Immigration, International

Europe’s Existential Crisis

Last May, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright handed German foreign minister Joschka Fischer a most confusing diagram. Beneath an array of apparently random scribbles, it depicted a map of Europe that appeared to have been defaced by an unusually energetic infant who had been allowed to run wild with a box of crayons.

After some effort, the eye could discern a number of sharply dissimilar circles … [ Read more ]

Author: Martin Walker
Source: The Wilson Quarterly (Winter2001)
Subjects: Articles & Links, International, Politics & Public Policy

What Cannot Be

Certain universal moral precepts may be biologically dictated as well. One such rule is at play in an ethical puzzle known as “the trolley problem.” Researchers pose the dilemma to subjects this way: A trolley barreling down a hill is headed straight for five people who have been tied to the tracks, but you can pull a switch to move the trolley onto a path … [ Read more ]

Author: Marc D. Hauser
Sources: Nature, The Wilson Quarterly (Autumn2009)
Note(s): Original Source: “The Possibility of Impossible Cultures” | Nature, July 9, 2009.
Subjects: Articles & Links, Culture, Sociology | Anthropology

How the Profound Changes in Economics Make Left Versus Right Debates Irrelevant

Economic thinking is changing. If that thesis is correct – and there are many reasons to believe it is – then historical experience suggests policy and politics will change as well. How significant that change will be remains to be seen. It is still early days and the impact thus far has been limited. Few politicians or policymakers are even dimly aware of the changes … [ Read more ]

Author: Eric Beinhocker
Source: Evonomics
Subjects: Articles & Links, Economics | Economy, Excerpts, Politics & Public Policy

The Quiet Coup

The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., … [ Read more ]

Author: Simon Johnson
Source: The Atlantic (May2009)
Subjects: Articles & Links, Economics | Economy, Finance | Investing

Philosophical Thoughts about Jokes

Ted Cohen professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago and a recipient of the university’s award for excellence in undergraduate teaching, visited eight campuses last year as a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar. One of the topics on which be lectured was ‘Jokes,” which is also the title of his latest book. This thought-provoking article is adapted from his lecture.

Author: Ted Cohen
Source: The Key Reporter (Summer2001)
Subjects: Articles & Links, Philosophy

What Makes a Great Teacher?

For years, the secrets to great teaching have seemed more like alchemy than science, a mix of motivational mumbo jumbo and misty-eyed tales of inspiration and dedication. But for more than a decade, one organization has been tracking hundreds of thousands of kids, and looking at why some teachers can move them three grade levels ahead in a year and others can’t. Now, as the … [ Read more ]

Author: Amanda Ripley
Source: The Atlantic (January2010)
Subjects: Articles & Links, Education | Scholarship