60 Minutes has never been the journalistic paragon of its makers' proud imaginings, but its slips have been particularly noticeable of late.
A lot of our society's overblown technophilia goes on fulsome display at Austin's annual gathering of the hip and innovative, South by Southwest Interactive. Jacob Silverman, an independent writer, travelled to the 2013 festival to cover it for the fiercely contrarian review, The Baffler.
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It was a letter from my life insurance company that got me thinking about the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre. I had applied for some additional insurance. After providing the company with the requested medical information, I received a machine-signed letter from an underwriter indicating that she “had hoped to approve the increase” but was “sorry” that she would be “unable to approve this change.”
Without going to any pains to prove it, Stewart charges that while previous ages valued honor, glory, heroic achievements, or an active public life, ours is "the first civilization to find its deepest fulfillment in its descendants. Our opium," he adds, "is our children."
The bitter partisanship of the Obama era leaves some pundits and commentators longing for political transcendence, for a land of harmony and cooperation in which Americans work together to achieve common purposes. Such longings for political and cultural unity surface whenever partisanship threatens to paralyze government and bickering brushes aside reasonable discourse and debate
News that humanities enrollments and majors are declining in American universities is not quite news, but the
New York Times recently devoted first-page attention to the trend, complete with some numbers that might be scary to at least part of the professoriate.