an examination of free will

Calibri: The Crime-Solving Font

The well-known Microsoft font Calibri is everywhere — including criminal investigations:

As part of an investigation launched by the country’s Supreme Court, the Prime Minister’s daughter had released a supposedly exculpatory document signed and dated February 2, 2006. The document, however, had been printed in Calibri, which was not widely available until 2007. Investigators deemed the document…

In this review of Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique, the author looks at contemporary literary criticism.

Felski asks what might happen if we looked not “behind the text” but “in front of the text, reflecting on what it unfurls, calls forth, makes possible.” In doing so, she seeks to rehabilitate the validity and importance of what we might call “literary desire”: the force that drives you to…

Are You Ready To Consider That Capitalism Is The Real Problem?

Is capitalism the problem?

Probably.

There are people in the U.S. fighting against the Keystone pipeline. There are people in Britain fighting against the privatization of the National Health Service. There are people in India fighting against corporate land grabs. There are people in Brazil fighting against the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. There are people in China fighting against…

The Rise of the Thought Leader

When did a TED talk become a philosophy course?

The rich have, Drezner writes, empowered a new kind of thinker—the “thought leader”—at the expense of the much-fretted-over “public intellectual.” Whereas public intellectuals like Noam Chomsky or Martha Nussbaum are skeptical and analytical, thought leaders like Thomas Friedman and Sheryl Sandberg “develop their own singular lens to explain the…

Did you know Brazilians are required to study philosophy?

In Ribeiro’s neighborhood, children play football or do capoeira, pray in Pentecostal Churches or worship African gods. Many are involved with drugs; “every year we lose students to crack,” she tells me. And they study philosophy two hours each week because of a 2008 law that mandates philosophy instruction in all Brazilian high schools.…

What do pit bull bans tell us about the freedom-versus-security dilemma?

In legal rationales, realities are created. Old inequalities and radical discrimination are repackaged in unexpected forms. In breed-specific legislation, the taint and incapacity of the disenfranchised live on. At a time when our government is labeling certain persons as threats—alleged terrorists, enemy aliens, illegal…

Many believe the Internet leads to democratization of authoritarian regimes (see media coverage of the Arab Spring). Evgeny Morozov stands against such technological determinism.

drawing conclusions about the democratizing nature of the Internet may still be premature. The major challenge in understanding the relationship between democracy and the Internet— aside from developing good measures of…

Choosing to Be Childless Comes with a Cost

Do you discriminate against those who choose not to have children?

“Our data suggests that not having children is seen not only as atypical or surprising, but also as morally wrong.”

Pacific Standard

Image: Painting by Brianna Keeper

Choosing to Be Childless Comes with a Cost

Do you discriminate against those who choose not to have children?

“Our data suggests that not having children is seen not only as atypical or surprising, but also as morally wrong.”

Pacific Standard

Image: Painting by Brianna Keeper

After the Fall of North Korea

What happens when the North Korean regime falls? In this presentation from the U.S. Army War College’s Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute, the international response to such an event is explored:

The purpose of this hypothetical case study/table top exercise (TTX) on North Korea is to teach the participants/students how difficult stability operations are in the immediate aftermath of…

Protean Miniatures: The Adaptability and Sustainability of Flash Fiction

What is flash fiction? Is it art? And why is it becoming so popular?

There is something a bit brazen about the flash form, something redolent of legerdemain and prestidigitation, a gumption, moxie, and chutzpah that is, in the best way, polarizing. One flash piece might “get through” to one reader, while it bounces off another with little effect. Some say this makes flash a shallow and subjective…

Do Twitter and Facebook spell the end of the critic?

Criticism of any kind is increasingly unwelcome at the digital-age paper. Consider a controversy that flared up in Canada last year. Arthur Kaptainis, who had long been the critic of the Montreal Gazette and more recently had been writing freelance for the National Post, reviewed a Canadian Opera Company production of Rossini’s “Maometto II.”…

It’s Time For The Right To Openly Embrace Classically Liberal Muslims

Undeniably, the politicization of Islam is harmful to its followers. What blame to the left and right share in this?

The Right and Left are both playing opposite sides of the same game, and happily so. The Left gets to use its identity politics wedge to create yet another special interest group, and the Right, masochistically, gets a new boogeyman to justify spending more money on police and the…

The Literary Legacy of Occupy Wall Street

How has Occupy Wall Street been depicted in recent literature? Has it been depicted?

It’s been over five years since Occupy Wall Street first entered the public consciousness, with a lengthy stint in lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park and subsequent acts continuing the themes of community activism, including relief work in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. As the movement became more and more…

Waking From the Dream

How well do our brains perceive inequality? Are skewed perceptions to blame for American inequality?

Keith Payne, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina, is intent on showing how the problem of inequality operates within the human mind. He does not claim to have studied the historical causes of the American class system, nor does he aim to explore the…