One of the social survey organizations in America recently asked this question of a hundred different people, and got answers ranging from ‘pure democracy’ to ‘pure diabolism’.
This past October, I taught a weeklong seminar on the history of conservatism to honors students from around the state of Oklahoma. In five long days, my nine very engaged students and I got to know each other fairly well. Six were African American women.
Almost two years ago, on a chilly February afternoon in Washington, D.C., Republican Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma took to the floor of the United States Senate, skeptically muttered a few things about rising global temperatures, then threw a snowball.
When we were in junior high school, my friend Rich and I made a map of the school lunch tables according to popularity. This was easy to do, because kids only ate lunch with others of about the same popularity. We graded them from A to E.
George Lakoff didn't start off in the world of politics. He was a founding father of cognitive linguistics, starting with his 1980 book, "Metaphors We Live By" (co-authored with philosopher Mark Johnson).
I recently heard one of the more interesting insights about Silicon Valley I'd heard in a while. It explained something I’d wondered about for years. But I can't tell you what it was.
If you had read in early 2016 about a National Policy Institute conference on the theme of “Identity Politics,” you might have assumed it was an innocent gathering of progressives. If you had attended, you would have been in for an unpleasant surprise.
Donald J. Trump has the good fortune of taking office as the economy is finally recovering from the 2008 crisis. For Democrats, the bad news is that just as Barack Obama got tarred by the struggling economy that he inherited from George W.
Red State Stupid is also really Red State Mean. It’s shoot-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face mean. My friend J. says that you can identify, with 100% accuracy, Democrats vs. Republicans with one simple test.
Julian Assange is a deeply polarizing figure. Many admire him and many despise him (into which category one falls in any given year typically depends on one’s feelings about the subject of his most recent publication of leaked documents).
Two decades ago, I wrote an essay in Foreign Affairs that described an unusual and worrying trend: the rise of illiberal democracy. Around the world, dictators were being deposed and elections were proliferating.
It is a bright cold day in December, and the clocks are striking thirteen. To the past or to the future, to an age when thought is free, from the age of Trump, from the age of Wikileaks, from a dead woman, greetings.
Donald Trump has announced that on December 15 he will hold a press conference to reveal to the world his plan to address the many conflicts of interest between his vast business empire and his new role as president.
“A woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs,” Samuel Johnson said back in 1791. “It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”Over two centuries later, denigrating women who dare to express their thoughts remains a popular cultural pastime.
It has happened to all of us. You’re standing in the produce aisle, just trying to buy some zucchini, when you face the inevitable choice: Organic or regular?
Umberto Eco (1932–2016) was President of the Scuola Superiore di Studi Umanistici at the University of Bologna and author of many books, including The Name of the Rose, Foucault’s Pendulum, and How to Write a Thesis.
To study and believe in a constitution—to give political allegiance to it as a nation’s highest law—requires a commitment to procedure. If the right rules are followed, if the procedures are fair, then the result, however regrettable, must be legitimate.
In a recent interview with Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, at approximately 14:20 in the interview, he made a quick point about coding with “good taste”. Good taste? The interviewer prodded him for details and Linus came prepared with illustrations. He presented a code snippet.
What on earth is going on in the Western democracies? From the rise of Donald Trump in the United States and an assortment of right-wing parties across Europe through the June 23 Brexit vote, many on the Left have the sense that something dangerous and ugly is spreading: right-wing populism, seen as
Over the years, I have watched campaigns in third world countries in which one candidate accuses the other of being a criminal, sometimes even threatening to jail his opponent once elected. But I cannot recall this happening in any Western democracy until this week.
Most of us have a pretty terrible understanding of history. Our knowledge is spotty, with large gaps all over the place, and the parts of history we do end up knowing a lot about usually depend on the particular teachers, parents, books, articles, and movies we happen to come across in our lives.
When I was in graduate school, a classmate confided in me that she was attracted to a mutual friend’s husband. She didn’t plan to pursue the man, but she told me that she found him attractive because he had all the qualities she was looking for in a boyfriend: He was handsome, he was stable, he had…
If you spend a lot of time typing plain text, writing programs or HTML, you can save much of that time by using a good editor and using it effectively. This paper will present guidelines and hints for doing your work more quickly and with fewer mistakes.
One of my numerous very boring hobbies is reading books about investing so you don’t have to. Often when I told people I was building a (toy) stock exchange they’d ask me for stock advice, which is about as well-considered as asking a WoW guild to deal with your terrorism problem.
White riotHow racism and immigration gave us Trump, Brexit, and a whole new kind of politicsUpdated Jan 20, 2017, 3:18 PM UTCpart ofUnderstanding the Trump erasee all Zack Beauchamp is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers ideology and challenges to democracy, both at home and abroad.
Bernie Sanders, the left-wing populist who for months competed with Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary, has popularized a simple vision for reform: introduce a Nordic-style welfare state in the United States.
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