The Politics of Single Issue Abortion Voters “Some, maybe even many, Trump voters acknowledged all these negative things and justify their vote by saying that Trump was the lesser evil–I actually think that is more honest even if I think they are wrong about which evil was lesser. At least they admit to there being […]
Authoritarians Distract Rather than Debate from: January 26, 2017 at 09:38PM
Sports and Media from: January 26, 2017 at 08:57PM
Strangers in Their Own Land: The ‘Deep Story’ of Trump Supporters from: January 26, 2017 at 08:21PM
Are women chess players intimidated by male opponents? Part II from: January 26, 2017 at 07:34PM
THE FUTURE OF LIBERALISM AND THE POLITICIZATION OF EVERYTHING “ Liberalism emerged historically as a means of enabling fruitful cooperation among people of divergent backgrounds and belief systems. Liberal norms were discovered, not invented, through a process of social evolution. Forgetting this can lead one to overestimate our ability to redesign society, even along more […]
This is your morning A Nigerian-American moves back to Nigeria: “‘When you wake up, that is your morning.’ She continues: ‘You know Igbo is full of proverbs, right? It’s how we say it is never too late to do your own work, or achieve what you have to achieve. Everybody’s timing is different.’”
Five-month-old babies know what’s funny “Like children and adults, infants appear to rely on two key features to detect funniness. First, humour nearly always requires a social component. Using naturalistic observations, the psychologists Robert Kraut and Robert Johnston at Cornell, and later the neuroscientist Robert Provine at the University of Maryland, discovered that smiling is […]
How Louis CK Tells A Joke January 22, 2017 at 06:04AM
The Threat of Moral Authority “When Trump dismissed Lewis as ‘all talk, talk, talk,’ he dismissed the value of moral politics in general, and in particular the basic conversation about right and wrong in which Lewis is engaging. In supporting Lewis, it’s important to recognize not only his personal history but the rhetorical history of […]
The UBI Bait and Switch “Just in case its intentions weren’t apparent, the government reaffirmed that the “primary goal of the basic income experiment is related to promoting employment.” As far as Centre was concerned, there was no reason to include low-earning adults already working or adults out of the labor force for reasons other […]
George Lakoff: How the Democrats Helped Elect Trump “…he has the whole strict-father thing, moral hierarchy. If you have strict-father morality what that says is it’s your concern alone that matters, reteaching individual responsibility. That means responsibility for yourself, not social responsibility. Not caring about other citizens; that’s weak. You should care about yourself; that’s […]
Quote about movements from Tyler Cowen “Every movement…has a smart version and a stupid version, I try to (almost) always consider the smart version. The stupid version is always wrong for just about anything.”
Radical Efforts to End Homelessness: A Sober Utopia from: January 12, 2017 at 11:34PM
The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority Nassim Nicholas Taleb: “It suffices for an intransigent minority –a certain type of intransigent minorities –to reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences. Further, an optical illusion […]
An Expert Called Lindy Nassim Nicholas Taleb: “Ideas need to have skin in the game. You know that the idea will fail if it is not useful, and can be therefore subjected to the falsification of time. The more an idea has been around without being falsified, the longer its future life expectancy. Note that […]
Stephen Skowronek’s theory of the cycles of presidential history “He claims all of presidential history follows a distinct pattern: “Reconstructive” presidents like Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan (to take only the last two cycles) transform American politics in their own image, clearing the field of viable competition and setting the terms of political debate. They […]
How To Be Calm Under Pressure: 3 Secrets From A Bomb Disposal Expert from: January 8, 2017 at 04:07PM
The Erasure of Islam from the Poetry of Rumi Safi has compared reading Rumi without the Koran to reading Milton without the Bible: even if Rumi was heterodox, it’s important to recognize that he was heterodox in a Muslim context—and that Islamic culture, centuries ago, had room for such heterodoxy. Rumi’s works are not just […]
THE NATIONALISTS’ DILEMMA from: January 6, 2017 at 12:37PM