We feel instinctively that societies with huge income gaps are somehow going wrong. Richard Wilkinson charts the hard data on economic inequality, and shows what gets worse when rich and poor are too far apart: real effects on health, lifespan, even such basic values as trust. About the Speaker: In “The Spirit Level,” Richard…
Read MoreI value fun and the sense that a rapper is enjoying their own skill rather than just telling me about it…
Read MoreThere are a handful of obvious goals we should have for humanity’s longterm future…
Read MoreAnthropology is fundamentally an anarchist project, as it zeroes in on levels of social reality where the state, even when it exists, is not the most salient factor in accounting for why human beings do what they do…
Read MoreAffiliation is a geography of bleeding boundaries and abrupt junctures…
Read MoreIt is the duty of intellectuals and artists to reject enforced glee, to carve out a preserve for the life of the soul as best they can, and to call madness by its name…
Read MoreIt works for the “alt-right” that relativism should prevail, although they bitterly denounce it – if truth is relative, then reality can be left to happen as inequality…
Read MoreThere are two competing perspectives about the cause of the opioid explosion, and they lead to different policy prescriptions…
Read MoreI miss many aspects of my chaplaincy training: the deep listening that can blossom in the most unexpected of circumstances, the twinning of action and reflection…
Read MoreAs power plants find more effective and eco-friendly ways to produce energy, they often increase their output in response to their elevated efficiency. In doing so, they also produce more CO2 than they would otherwise…
Read MoreBy narrowly defining slavery as limited to the U.S. South and the West Indies, ethical capitalists were able to argue that ‘nothing was a bad as white-owned plantation slavery, and therefore everything else could be described as ethical capitalism’…
Read MoreTo the vast majority of bitcoin investors, success means its price continues to rise. But if that is all there is to it, someday a little boy will yell, “the Emperor has no clothes”, and the price will come crashing down…
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