Big History has its charms. It aligns with Common Core, provides a wealth of material online for free, and is exciting. But it may be too big to be history at all.
William Deresiewicz not only critiques the idea that college education is about learning marketable skills; he also revives the quest for meaning, self, and soul.
Mailer, Trilling, Macdonald, Kazin, Maxwell, Bellow, Auden, O’Hara—men with public moral concerns, who seized power to shape American literature. But who were they?
Baxter reads fiction to “see bad stuff happening.” He writes characters who get into serious trouble, and face their own “human wreckage” at someone else’s request.
Kevin Kruse convincingly claims that the association of patriotism with Christianity comes from a libertarian reaction in American business to the New Deal.
Tension between religious freedom and combating discrimination is the frame for RFRA debates. But these highlight a more basic problem with RFRA jurisprudence.
“New atheists” like Richard Dawkins have made a splash with aggressive attacks on religion. But Michael Ruse, philosopher and reflective atheist, is not impressed.
Posner’s attempt to intertwine Vatican finance with a history of the papacy—“rampant corruption, pervasive nepotism, unbridled debauchery”—isn’t neutral, or correct.
How can we choose to have agency over our lives when we are bombarded by choices? Crawford proposes a way to reclaim your attention span and thereby reclaim yourself
The resonances of “It Follows” are varied and strange, touching on subtexts sexual, ethical, and sociological. The horrors in ” ’71″ are frightening for being true.
...in the name of the washed-up, / the lapsed and forgotten, / remnants joined to give loss, // no matter how touch / or random, another shot / at consequence...
The Obama administration has not made grandiose claims about what a deal with Iran on its nuclear program can achieve. But there is reason for guarded optimism.
The furor over Indiana’s RFRA raises questions about our capacity to engage in the kind of thoughtful, careful public discussion that issues like this demand.
