Do We Absolutely Disagree?
Alan Jacobs
Well known free speech advocates may not always be free speech absolutists.
Well known free speech advocates may not always be free speech absolutists.
A trick that only the most gifted demagogues can bring off.
What haunted Edmund was a fear of being second best.
Americans have been making arguments about the nature of their unity from the beginning.
The events of January 6 went off script.
Donald Trump’s manner was a declaration of indifference toward the values that make democracy possible.
A zero sum reality, in which every win is someone else’s loss, exists in a constant state of crisis.
In spite of myself, something in my gut told me that the statue of General Robert E. Lee should have stayed.
What we really need right now is a new kind of hero—calling all historians!
“Crisis” itself is in crisis, such that both the structure and urgency of the crisis of climate change could elude us.
What should the compensation be for overserving a prison sentence?
Just as Obama became a symbol of progressive diversity, Trump has become a symbol of longing for a pre-Obama America.
Many began watching last night’s debate wondering: Which Trump would it be? But there’s only one.
Is it enough for a business to turn a profit? Or should a business cultivate human flourishing and shared prosperity to be considered a success?
In identifying “the system” as the issue of this election, Trump has managed to find a singular concept by which to encompass issues from wage stagnation to political corruption.
Numbers and big data may be able to show us how to do things better, but they cannot show us how to do things.
As we remember the Challenger disaster, let’s not forget the engineers who tried to convince NASA not to send up the Space Shuttle on a cold morning thirty years ago.
Teenagers have multiple motivations for their use of social media, but a concern about their status with other peers is certainly central—and social visibility is a prerequisite to such status.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; even smaller minds complain about the rest of these people.
After situating themselves in a “wild” context, both women do what the entire history of nature writing has implicitly instructed them not to do: they bring their emotional backpacks into the landscape.
Is the science in social science worth defending? The short answer is yes, and the long answer is that it depends on how you define science.
If we want the Internet to remain free and open for everyone, is it right to exclude bullies and jerks? Lessons from the Ellen Pao incident.
It's just not possible to love something that says “be unique, but only as unique as we'll allow you to be.”
Summer reads from THR staff and friends.
Francis’s integral ecology challenges some tendencies on both the right and the left.
For the editors of The Economist, euthanasia is "an idea whose time has come."
Meaningful social change requires the kind of social reconciliation that can only emerge through aggregated instances of both forgiveness and repentance.
New Orleans, where spectacle and transgression are part of the infrastructure, is the ideal place to conduct completely unscientific research on tattooing.
We have no way of knowing whether Tsarnaev was given the opportunity to avoid a trial and plead to a life sentence, or if he would have taken that offer had it been made. It seems clear that there are inconsistencies when government determines when to seek death sentences.
When did we stop believing in rehabilitation? The case of Lima-Marin should make us stop and ask why we punish, and what happens to those we punish.
Is plain packaging for cigarettes a barrier to trade?
If technology rarely delivers on its claims, then need we waste so much as a backward glance as we dash ahead to the next digital milestone?
Cubism’s stylistic hegemony—the dislocated binaries, the tactile surfaces in a two-dimensional work, and the distortions—interferes with what we want to understand about what few clues we can decipher.
Moyn's ambition for the discipline of history undercuts its legitimacy as a distinct form of knowledge and denies the ethic of the craft.
Taylor Swift’s recent trademarking frenzy is another example of how artists are scrambling to maintain control over their work in the face of the digital tsunami.
To reduce a museum experience to the laws of supply and demand devalues not only the art itself but also the curators’ years of education and expertise—connoisseurship on which we rely in institutions that position themselves as cultural arbiters.
Pantone's Marsala is no mauve, but it does reflect our present cultural mood.
Looking for some stories for Halloween? Start here.
Whole Foods Market is tired of your “whole paycheck” jokes. Recently, “America’s healthiest grocery store” launched a multi-million dollar advertising campaign titled Values Matter.
A monkey's selfie has done more than just raise awareness about an endangered species.
“My word is my bond,” business “done with a handshake,” and “honor codes” are not even the rhetoric of the day, much less the reality.
As Winter Storm Pax pushes across the eastern United States this week, I find myself pondering the power of names.