Forty years ago, PBS released a series of Bill Moyers’ conversations with professor Joseph Campbell, who is famous research on mythology. Netflix has commemorated this anniversary by making the series available on their streaming service.
Our greatest dreams are our most dangerous, our most volatile. No one said the dream would be cheap.
Boredom has disappeared from our lives and with it, the ingenuity it spawned.
Our government is for sale, but don’t blame Donald Trump. His clumsy cast of cartoon Mafiosi have merely taken the finesse out of the game, placing the oily guts of the machine out in the daylight.
Neither the 1st Amendment, nor any moral or intellectual notion of free speech grants me a right to be taken seriously. No one has a 1st Amendment right to appear in a particular media platform. No one has a 1st Amendment right to be invited to speak on campus, be interviewed on TV, teach a class in a university, or get a featured column in The Atlantic. Freedom of speech is not equality of ideas.
Diversity is about more than the humane tolerance of others, it is an evolutionary imperative. We will master a world of looser, more diverse cultural ties, or fall behind those who do.
Though many aspects of this emerging environment seem disturbing or disheartening, life for human beings is improving on nearly every measurable axis. Humans are freer, wealthier, healthier and happier than at any point in our evolution. It may not seem like it, but the world is getting better.
If the Idiocrats in the Trump administration wanted to dent the marijuana business, it would take a carefully planned campaign, coordinated with sympathetic state level officials and executed with great care and discretion. That’s not how these people operate.
It may not seem like it now, but 2017 was a year rich in heroes.
It was a time for looking back, reflected in the presence of three historical counterfactuals in the reading list.