Purveyor of Iniquities

Actually, parent-child play of this sort has been virtually unheard of throughout human history, according to the anthropologist David Lancy.

The speakers were laughing more than the listeners. Every time that would happen, I would think, ‘OK, I have to go back and start over again because that can’t be right.

Seduced by the idea that there is an omnipotent media, Gore seems to have little faith in the capacity of the public to discriminate, reflect and make up its own mind on important issues.

Outside of the Levitt versus Lott controversy, one of the book’s most fascinating chapters argues that female suffrage has led to government growth.

as long as the standard exhibition format for Hollywood movies remains 35mm film, the industry maintains its monopoly over the multiplexed middle.

As Ehrman puts it, there are more points of disagreement between manuscripts than there are words in the Gospels. So which one is right? How can one tell what the original authors intended?

“Reason of state,” the Realist’s linchpin, is pre- or anti-democratic, a seemingly lofty concept that the mighty routinely invoke against domestic pressure or dissent.

Time and again, people have invested factual claims with ethical implications that today look ludicrous. The fear that the structure of our solar system has grave moral consequences is a venerable example; “intelligent design” a contemporary one.

Nixon’s party on the China trip “had hardly got to the end of Mao’s long driveway before they began the reinterpretation of their host’s anodyne, geriatric remarks into Confucian proverbs virtually written on giant tablets of the rarest marble.”

A criminal trial in Baltimore turns on the law of the social contract