The Onion reports on the blunder: WASHINGTON—At a press conference Monday, visibly embarrassed leaders of the Republican National Committee acknowledged that their nonstop, effusive praise of Ronald Reagan has been wholly unintentional, admitting they somehow managed to confuse him with Dwight D. Eisenhower for years. The GOP’s humiliating blunder was discovered last weekend by RNC [...]
Kwame Anthony Appiah explores a thesis I’ve never heard before in his new book, The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen summarized by Matthew Pianalto: Judged by contemporary Western standards, honour has a mixed moral record. On the one hand, a sense of gentlemanly honour underwrote the practice of duelling, long after it had been [...]
Sendai Anonymous picks apart a critique of Hannah Arendt’s famous analysis of Nazi Adolf Eichmann as embodying the banality of evil: It is the last paragraph of Sholem’s letter that seems to me most revealing: Sholem remarks that he regrets that she rejected the previous version of her analysis of evil, an analysis that was [...]
There’s a fascinating website called Daily Routines, which documents, in its own words “how writers, artists, and other interesting people organize their days”. Via Francis Darwin’s memories of his father’s life, they have an entry on the rigid routine of Darwin’s life in his middle and later years: 7 a.m. Rose and took a short [...]
BBC Radio 4 ran readings of Beagle’s Diary as its Book of the Week in December 2006. Here are all five episodes: Episode 1, Episode 2, Episode 3, Episode 4, and Episode 5. A description of the book from The Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online: The Beagle Diary is read by Jo Stone-Fewings. Each episode is introduced by historian [...]
Some already did: In July of 1798, Congress passed – and President John Adams signed – “An Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen.” The law authorized the creation of a government operated marine hospital service and mandated that privately employed sailors be required to purchase health care insurance. Keep in mind that [...]
Nathan Brown is a political science professor at George Washington University and director of the school’s Institute for Middle East Studies. He gives an overview of the Muslim Brotherhood’s evolution from their found through to today, explains how their renunciation of violent means came to pass decades ago, why al-Qaeda sees them as sell outs, [...]
A description of the 6 part video which begins below (click through to watch the whole thing): One of the world’s greatest authorities on the Middle Ages, Professor Robert Bartlett of St Andrew’s University, investigates the intellectual landscape of the medieval world. In the first programme, Knowledge, he explores the way medieval man understood the world [...]
Many a religious person defending her own religious beliefs will argue that a given politically, morally, or intellectually unflattering interpretation of her faith is simply not a true representation of her faith. While the question of who has the right or the adequate means to decisively determine with any rational clarity which competing interpretation of any [...]
Noting the shadiness and creepiness of public remarks by Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam behind the plan to build a mosque blocks away from the former site of the Twin Towers, Christopher Hitchens is nonetheless repulsed by the tactics adopted by his opposition. Starting with Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, he writes: [...]
Stanley Milgram was the psychologist who performed the famous obedience experiments which involved getting normal people to go through with administering (what they thought were) extraordinarily painful shocks to other people out of deference to calm but firm orders from an authority figure. Now Mind Hacks points our attention to The Tenth Level a fascinating bit [...]
Common ancestry surprises are not just for species: Reading David McCullough’s 1776, I found myself wondering: Did Americans in 1776 have British accents? If so, when did American accents diverge from British accents? The answer surprised me. I’d always assumed that Americans used to have British accents, and that American accents diverged after the Revolutionary War, [...]
Via Yglesias, comes this review of World War II: But then there are some shows that go completely beyond the pale of enjoyability, until they become nothing more than overwritten collections of tropes impossible to watch without groaning. I think the worst offender here is the History Channel and all their programs on the so-called [...]
The unabridged Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1, delayed by Twain’s request for a century, is coming this fall. The New York Times describes choice passages: Twain excoriates “the iniquitous Cuban-Spanish War” and Gen. Leonard Wood’s “mephitic record” as governor general in Havana. In writing about an attack on a tribal group in the Philippines, [...]
Article 11: Art. 11. As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,—as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen,—and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan [...]
The first president of our secular republic writes: To the Hebrew Congregation in Newport Rhode Island. Gentlemen, While I receive, with much satisfaction, your Address replete with expressions of affection and esteem; I rejoice in the opportunity of assuring you, that I shall always retain a grateful remembrance of the cordial welcome I experienced in [...]
PZ Myers calls our attention to Sinclair Lewis’s 75 year old words to warn us about how precious and precarious our freedom from theocracy and all other forms of tyranny really is: In 1935, Sinclair Lewis wrote a novel called “It Can’t Happen Here,” about an America taken over by a populist dictator. His hero [...]
Edna St. Vincent Millay: Conscientious Objector I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death. I hear him leading his horse out of the stall; I hear the clatter on the barn-floor. He is in haste; he has business in Cuba, business in the Balkans, many calls to make this morning. [...]
What to make of those in the south who claim the Confederate flag as part of a properly American southern heritage? Ta-Nehisi Coates is eloquent: But people can fly the Confederate Flag and have a serious, evidently credible argument, about its “precise meaning,” mostly because of a long historical fight to make the Civil War, [...]
From Three Poems by Nicole Cooley: Testimony: He or His Apparition About noon, at Salem, Giles Corey was press’d to death for standing Mute. — Samuel Sewall, Diary, September 19, 1692 The girls’ testimony is gravel scattered on the grass. Ann Putnam: Giles Corey or his Apperance has most greviously afflected me by beating pinching and almost [...]
Happy Independence Day! Your Thoughts?
Pinker argues for this pro-modern thesis in his 2007 TED video: Your Thoughts?
People For The American Way have an analysis of the process by which Texas’s textbook standards became tools for rewriting history according to a contemporary right wing religious political viewpoint. Here are just a few glimpses of the changes, both those merely proposed and those actually accepted by the school board, which I had not [...]
Here is Jennifer Michael Hecht, author of Doubt: A History: The Great Doubters and Their Legacy of Innovation from Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson at Hampshire College in 2007 discussing the the wrote the complicated history of doubt and atheism: Your Thoughts?