Author: Yuval Noah Harari | Source: Big Think (August 11, 2025) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Information, Intelligence | Knowledge, IT | Technology, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior
Philosophically speaking, the right has long been defined by its emphasis on the value of stability — as odd as it may seem in the era of Trump’s radically destabilizing administration.
Conservative theorists, most notably Edmund Burke, have long maintained that political flourishing depends on the existence of stable social rules developed gradually and from the bottom up over the course of generations. Those who seek … [ Read more ]
Author: Zack Beauchamp | Source: Vox (June 11, 2025) | Subjects: America, Articles & Links, Excerpts, International, Politics & Public Policy
As the Republican Party evolves from a party focused on individual liberty and limits on government power to a party that more fully embraces government control of the economy and morality, it is reversing many of its previous stances on free speech in public universities, in public education, and in private corporations. Driven by a combination of partisan animosity and public fear, it is embracing … [ Read more ]
Author: David French | Source: The Atlantic (April 11, 2022) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Excerpts, Freedom | Liberty, Politics & Public Policy
Years before Walter Lippmann explored stereotypes and the psychology of prejudice, rooted in the disquieting fact that “we do not first see, and then define, [but] define first and then see,” and decades before Hannah Arendt observed that “society has discovered discrimination as the great social weapon by which one may kill men without any bloodshed” before she … [ Read more ]
Authors: Elsie Clews Parsons, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (March 11, 2020) | Subjects: Excerpts, Immigration, Life & Society, Power, Sociology | Anthropology
Why is it easy for some people to learn to read, and difficult for others? It’s a tough question with a long history.
Author: Maria Konnikova | Source: The New Yorker (February 11, 2015) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Education | Scholarship, Excerpts
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