Partisan bickering has become the rule on Capitol Hill, but once--and not all that long ago--debate and compromise got things done.
Sure, politicians shouldn't make promises they'll never keep. But citizens shouldn't ask more from them than they can provide.
CITIES OF WORDS:
Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life.
By Stanley Cavell
We've all gotten used to terror threat levels, but are we really preparing for the right things?
COPIES IN SECONDS:
How a Lone Inventor and an
Unknown Company Created the Biggest Communication Breakthrough since Gutenberg—Chester Carlson and the Birth of the Xerox Machine.
By David Owen.
Military service is supposed to create better citizens, but it doesn't always work out that way.
From the sudden spread of West Nile virus in the United States to the discovery that Galápagos Island finches are evolving by unexpected means, there are signs that the natural world does not function quite as we thought. A variety of scientific findings now point to the need for a radically revised understanding of the way evolution itself works.
Imagine a breezy, palm-fringed island in the Indian Ocean. There’s no money, no Internet or TV, and a single phone line to the outside world. Only a handful of people are allowed to visit each year. Tempted? The author was, and he tells what he found.
For centuries, Russia’s intelligentsia occupied a unique place in the life of its country, flickering like the light of a candle in the dark. Now that the worst of the darkness has been disspelled, will the light vanish too?
What two eloquent Frenchmen, Voltaire and Montesquieu, had to say in the 18th century about the forces that sustain or shatter great powers remains surprisingly relevant.