If you're not at least somewhat concerned about most social media platforms right now, you're not paying attention. I won't give an exhaustive, or even comprehensive, list of reasons for concern here because you either know lots of them or can find them yourselves. But they include the ways in which many devices/apps/netowrks and combinations …
They're missing the 'e' in "opine," but I didn't let that stop me
While the courageous sacrifice themselves and their own advantage for the truth, cowards sacrifice the truth for themselves and their own advantage.
Looks like burning one's shoes is a great way to get likes and RTs and new follows today. It's also a great way to promote raw political realism, undermine truth, and obscure courage. This morning I visited Twitter. Aside from Barry Butler's beautiful shot of "Geese at Sunrise on Chicago's Lake Michigan," my feed was mostly …
Two things I recall (one I had to unlearn) from Army ROTC
I stumbled onto this article about After-Action Reviews (AARs), and it got me thinking about some things I had learned from my few semesters in Army ROTC. I started out my time as an undergraduate student on an Army ROTC scholarship. While a broken ankle (during a ROTC event) kept me from finishing the program and …
Continue reading Two things I recall (one I had to unlearn) from Army ROTC
I had two conversations today -- one with an executive director of a nonprofit agency and one with a c-level university official. Different topics. Different sectors. The one thing those meetings had in common? Both said they saw a lack of courage in their institutional contexts and in our broader social contexts.
Three challenging readings for this Independence Day
Frederick Douglass' timeless speech "The Meaning of the Fourth of July for the Negro" Note Douglass' use of scripture to illuminate a likeness between the United States and Babylon, between enslaved Africans and Old Testament exiles... To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in …
Continue reading Three challenging readings for this Independence Day
Pizza delivery and the future of cities
Earlier this week, The Wall Street Journal ran a special section on the future of cities, which included a number of mildly interesting pieces. The best two were about walkability and natural disasters. Tucked right in the middle, though, was a half-page piece titled "Pizza Delivery Gears Up for a Driverless Era." It seems smart …
Bryan Caplan’s Orwellian take on education
From my review of Bryan Caplan's The Case Against Education in this summer's issue of The Hedgehog Review. Orwellian is an epithet with many meanings, all of them negative. It can refer to doublespeak, the use of pretentious diction, distortion, evasive speech, intentional ambiguity, and euphemism meant to make an unpleasant truth sound more palatable. …
"By the final decade of the twentieth century, commentators who insisted on drafting all American evangelicals into "red state" ranks did so only by ignoring the diversity, ambiguity, and contradiction among believers who had learned to produce so many versions of their own history that one self-described "evangelical" barely resembled the next." --Molly Worthen, Apostles …
Updated: Why I Won’t Be Protesting at This Year’s Independence Day Parade
(June 27: Below you'll find the original text of a post suggesting that Independence Day parade-goers should find a way to protest family separation at the southern border. Thankfully, the practice of family separation has been halted, and while family reunification has been slow and poorly organized, a federal judge has ruled that all children …
Continue reading Updated: Why I Won’t Be Protesting at This Year’s Independence Day Parade
The U.S. Border and Nazi Germany: The limits and power of analogies; observations and questions
For the past several years, I've had the opportunity to visit Berlin almost annually as I've taught at the Free University of Berlin. Those who have had a chance to visit the city know that it is compact and accessible, so a visitor can see quite a bit during a short stay, but it is …
