When Thomas Paine appealed to “common sense” to make the case for American independence, it probably never crossed his mind that there would ever be a need to make the case for common sense itself, at least not in America. But common-sense thinking has fallen out of favor. Because it has been under attack for
If you’re just hearing about the "Intellectual Dark Web," or if you’ve heard the term but never delved into its meaning, you might think there is an entire parallel internet out there, filled with subversive content that is too politically incorrect to weather the shadowbans and deboosting algorithms in our well lit, mainstream online world.
Writing in the December 1991 issue of Academic Questions, Fred Siegel, associate professor of history at Cooper Union and a self-described liberal and Democrat, bemoaned a fashionable trend in history writing. The “New Historians,” he quipped, saw American life as “a story of defeat, despair, and domination. American history became a tragedy in three acts:
No one speaks of a century’s first decade as “the aughts.” Few of us speak of the second decade as “the teens.” But by the time the third decade comes around, we seem to have gotten used to the charming fact that we’re in a new chapter of history. Our shouts of “It’s the 21st
For decades, American workers have watched as their ability to enjoy middle-class lifestyles erodes away. Conventional explanations abound. American industry in the immediate aftermath of World War II was uniquely unscathed, and with a near-monopoly on global manufacturing, it was able to pass much of the ample profits on to workers. It wasn’t until the
Over the past two weeks, the streets of Hong Kong have been racked with protests on a scale rarely seen. By some accounts, more than 2 million people participated, over a quarter of Hong Kong’s population of 7 million. The cause of the massive unrest was a proposed law that would allow accused criminals to
After the unexpected election of President Donald Trump, something else unexpected happened. The stock market soared. In the final week before the 2016 election, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 17,888, an unimpressive level, since it had reached that same point nearly two years earlier in December 2014. But following Trump’s victory, the Dow
Compassion for a child in distress is automatic. You do everything you can for that child. You use all the resources you can muster. But what if an entire continent is in distress? What if billions of children are in distress? This is the question for which there are no easy answers. Because across the
In 1968, Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb. Ehrlich predicted mass-starvation by the mid-1970s due to an exploding human population outstripping agricultural capacity. Global population in 1968 was 3.5 billion. Today there are 7.6 billion people living on planet earth. Clearly, Ehrlich’s dire predictions were wrong, but the book was
