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the number one thing is to have a real passion for your subject and to be able to convey that to your students. Obviously the content is important, but that's not as unusual as being able to really convey why you think history is important.

I'm strongly in favor of students knowing the facts of history, not just memorizing or having it drilled into their heads.

also I think what I see in college students, that seems to be lacking at least when they come into college, is writing experience. In other words, being able to write that little essay with an argument.

Sara Rosenbaum, a professor of health law and policy at George Washington University, studied what happened when Texas blocked Planned Parenthood grants and tried to move the money to other providers. Even when there were other clinics in an area, she said, “they were overbooked with their own patients. What happened in Texas was the amount of family planning services dropped. And the next thing that happened, of course, was that unplanned pregnancies began to rise.”

If an elected official wants to try to drive Planned Parenthood out of business, there are two honest options: Announce that first you’re going to invest a ton of new taxpayer money in creating real substitutes, or shrug your shoulders and tell the world that you’re fine with cutting off health services to some of your neediest constituents

Morris takes on theories which "suggest that there is something unique about western culture". His argument is simple: "from the Mediterranean to the Yellow Sea," there were philosophers wrestling with the same questions "and finding similar answers" as Socrates. "Socrates was part of a huge pattern, not a unique giant who sent the West down a superior path". What can I say? Does Morris, a specialized Professor of Classics, seriously believe that Indian and Chinese thinkers were reasoning in ways similar to Europeans? First of all, one of the exceptional qualities about the West is the continuous sequence of original thinkers in ancient Greece, in Rome, in Christian and in Modern Europe. The mere appearance of a Socrates at one point in time is not the issue. Find me in ancient Asia a continuous line of original thinkers

Morris brings up the Renaissance only to tell us that there were renaissances everywhere. The revivals ones sees in Asia history were always revivals of the same traditional ways of thinking; imagine Europeans for ever writing textual studies of Plato

Christianity? -- well, Morris says that all religions are the same. Christianity and Islam are fundamentally different religious traditions, and not only because the former has exhibited a far richer scholarly tradition, which is rather visible in the immediate fusion of Greek philosophy, Roman Law, and Christian theology in the first centuries AD, not to mention the Middle Ages, but because in Islam the idea that Allah has limits to his own powers, by making an everlasting covenant, with human beings, is unthinkable, in that Allah is viewed as absolutely transcendent; whereas for Christianity the authority of the earthly rulers is limited by God's law, which both grants rights to every person and holds that God is conterminous with Reason. There is no self-limitation to the sovereignty of Islamic rulers, and for this reason Islam has faced great difficulties producing a secular political order subject to constitutional checks and balances.

Instead of the go-to ingredients previously used in animal protein substitutes — soy, wheat gluten, vegetable starches — Food 2.0 companies are using computer algorithms to analyze hundreds of thousands of plant species to find out what compounds can be stripped out and recombined to create what they say are more delicious and sustainable sources of protein.

Hampton Creek and its rivals say they can come up with better products by relying more on computational science than food science.

But there’s a significant ick factor when it comes to so-called Frankenfoods.

I study race and the Greek-letter system on North American campuses. I have interviewed hundreds of members of historically white fraternities and sororities, at big state universities and smaller liberal arts colleges, on the East Coast and in the South. My research indicates that nonwhite students who successfully pledge those groups — roughly 3 to 4 percent of fraternity or sorority members — live a harsh existence of loneliness and isolation.

Without attention to the internal power dynamics and racism inside these organizations, we place an inordinate burden on the few students of color in them to carry our torch of idealism while we ignore the banal hostility they face.

Nearly all the nonwhite members told me of their white fraternity and sorority brothers’ and sisters’ expectation that they conform to demeaning racial stereotypes. If they failed, they were seen as not fully belonging; if they succeeded, they were understood to be “too” black, Latino or Asian to fit in. This, known as the paradox of participation, governed their acceptance. But to outsiders, the color line was broken.

To many conservatives, the mortality rate shock is the latest indictment of modern liberalism’s mix of moral permissiveness and welfare-state paternalism: The first undercuts the rootedness, discipline and purpose that marriage and religion once supplied, and the latter eases people into a life of dependence and disability payments that only encourages drug abuse and suicidal thoughts.

But if the problem is social liberalism and the welfare state, progressives object, then why is the working class death rate only rising starkly in the United States? In the more secular and socialist territory of the European Union, Deaton and Case are at pains to note, white mortality rates have continued to decline.

This buttresses the longstanding liberal argument that the American working class has fallen victim, not to dependency and libertinism, but to a punishing economic climate — stagnant wages, a fraying safety net, and Republican economic policies that redistribute wealth upward

There are a few obvious lessons from this debacle. “All the important people say so” is not, it turns out, a good way to decide on policy; groupthink is no substitute for clear analysis. Also, calling for sacrifice (by other people, of course) doesn’t mean you’re tough-minded.

What this suggests is that the turn to austerity had truly catastrophic effects, going far beyond the jobs and income lost in the first few years. In fact, the long-run damage suggested by the Fatás-Summers estimates is easily big enough to make austerity a self-defeating policy even in purely fiscal terms: Governments that slashed spending in the face of depression hurt their economies, and hence their future tax receipts, so much that even their debt will end up higher than it would have been without the cuts.

countries that seem to have largely recovered from the crisis, like the United States, are far poorer than precrisis projections suggested they would be at this point. And a new paper by Mr. Summers and Antonio Fatás, in addition to supporting other economists’ conclusion that the crisis seems to have done enormous long-run damage, shows that the downgrading of nations’ long-run prospects is strongly correlated with the amount of austerity they imposed.

“Like many historical figures, Rhodes did both good and bad, and things look different when today’s standards are applied,” Mr. Gerson said. “Our values today are opposed to the views of the world held by Rhodes, and much of his generation, but his bequest is forever deserving of respect.”

“Its wording is a political tribute, and the college believes its continuing display on Oriel property is inconsistent with our principles,” it said.The statement added that the statue raised more complex issues and that “in the absence of any context or explanation, it can be seen as an uncritical celebration of a controversial figure, and the colonialism and the oppression of black communities he represents.”

“Rhodes was not a campaigner against racism, but many of the scholars who are his legacy have been,” Mr. Abbott wrote.“Oxford would damage its standing as a great university if it were to substitute moral vanity for fair-minded inquiry,” he said, adding that “the university and its students should prefer improving today’s orthodoxies to imposing them on our forebears.”

An isolated Osama bin Laden struggled to keep his bodyguards

In the last months of his life, an isolated Osama bin Laden was in a serious dispute with the two brothers who had been pretty much his only connection to the outside world for the previous eight years.

Worried about the CIA hunting for him, bin Laden was confined to one building inside the large compound in Abbottabad, which the brothers had moved him to in 2005.

crudely written email threat to members of the Los Angeles Board of Education prompted officials to close all 900 schools in the nation’s second-largest school system Tuesday, sending parents from San Pedro to Pacoima scrambling to find day care — while New York law enforcement dismissed a nearly identical threat from the same sender as an obvious hoax

The unprecedented districtwide shutdown reflected the tense atmosphere over possible terrorist attacks less than two weeks after two Islamic radicals opened fire at a workplace party in San Bernardino, killing 14.

L.A. Unified School District Supt. Ramon Cortines said he made the decision to order the school closures because he couldn’t take a chance with the system’s 640,000 students.By evening, school officials said they had inspected all campuses and that the FBI had discredited the threat.

the antiestablishment candidates now dominating the field, aside from being deeply ignorant about policy, have a habit of making false claims, then refusing to acknowledge error. Why don’t Republican voters seem to care?

part of the answer has to be that the party taught them not to care. Bluster and belligerence as substitutes for analysis, disdain for any kind of measured response, dismissal of inconvenient facts reported by the “liberal media” didn’t suddenly arrive on the Republican scene last summer. On the contrary, they have long been key elements of the party brand. So how are voters supposed to know where to draw the line?

the 2000 election, but during the campaign Republicans tried — largely successfully — to make the election about likability, not policy. George W. Bush was supposed to get your vote because he was someone you’d enjoy having a beer with, unlike that stiff, boring guy Al Gore with all his facts and figures.

Trump’s resounding success with the reckless abandonment of the norms of political discourse suggests that he has tapped into a deep reservoir of antipathy to the culture of polite restraint.

Over all, 68 percent agreed that political correctness was a big problem, including 62 percent of self-identified Democrats, 68 percent of independents and 81 percent of Republicans. These views cut across racial lines. Seventy-two percent of whites and 61 percent of nonwhites (mostly African-American and Hispanic) describe political correctness as a big problem

This poll data indicates that even members of racial and ethnic minorities who are protected by speech codes as well as by the suppression of offensive language are hostile to political correctness.

Everyone has a religion. It is, in fact, impossible not to have a religion if you are a human being. It’s in our genes and has expressed itself in every culture, in every age, including our own secularized husk of a society.

By religion, I mean something quite specific: a practice not a theory; a way of life that gives meaning, a meaning that cannot really be defended without recourse to some transcendent value, undying “Truth” or God (or gods).

Which is to say, even today’s atheists are expressing an attenuated form of religion. Their denial of any God is as absolute as others’ faith in God, and entails just as much a set of values to live by — including, for some, daily rituals like meditation, a form of prayer.

naturally fair hair is uncommon: An estimated 2 percent of the world’s population—and 5 percent of white Americans—is actually towheaded. Blond hair is the result of a genetic mutation typically associated with northern Europeans, but it has also been seen in a small percentage of Aboriginal Australians, Northern Africans, and Asians.

There are a multitude of reasons why someone might choose blond. For subjects featured in Stamped, it was a way to cover gray hair, to look younger, to be treated better, to look better, or to look more like themselves:

for the most part, interviewees didn’t mention the connection between whiteness and blondness until Rankine prompted them. “I think part of our orientation as Americans has been to substitute the word ‘white’ with ‘people,’” Rankine says. “Consequently, when they think of blondness, they're thinking of the hair color of ‘people,’ people who are valued. But they don’t understand that that value attaches to whiteness.”

A tyrant is unloved, and although the laws and institutions of the United States have proven a brake on Trump, his spirit remains tyrannical—that is, utterly self-absorbed and self-concerned, indifferent to the suffering of others, knowing no moral restraint. He expects fealty and gives none. Such people can exert power for a long time, by playing on the fear and cupidity, the gullibility and the hatreds of those around them. Ideological fervor can substitute for personal affection and attachment for a time, and so too can blind terror and sheer stupidity, but in the end, these fall away as well.

The normal course of events is sudden, epic desertion, in which an all-powerful political figure who loomed over everything is suddenly left shrunken and pitiful, a wretched little figure in gaudy robes absurdly too big for him, a figure of ridicule as much as, and even more than, hatred.

if they suffer a medieval-style slaughter on Election Day, the remnants of the knights of the GOP will know a greater fear than that of being primaried. And at the moment when they no longer fear being swept away in 2020, when the economy may be in recession and Robert Mueller’s probe is complete with revelations whose ghastliness would delight the three witches of the Scottish play, they will suddenly turn on Trump. Act V of this play will also have a nonlinear finish.

What does all this achieve? No doubt just what Trump intends: the collapse of the liberal international order, both in its animating commitment to open societies as well as its defining international institutions — the G-7, NATO, the European Union, the World Trade Organization

Above all, it’s fair to prod and cajole and quarrel with our core allies — in private. But Trump is out to embarrass them in public, putting them to the choice of becoming enemies or toadies, breaking up or sucking up. That’s no doubt fine with him: America First is America Feared. But it is also America hated, and hated with justification. Where’s the upside in that?

For Trump, the upside is the substitution of a liberal order with an illiberal one, based on conceits about sovereignty, nationality, religion and ethnicity. These are the same conceits that Vladimir Putin has long made his own

In places such as Silicon Valley, the slopes of Davos, Switzerland, and the halls of Harvard Business School, there is a sense that the kind of capitalism that once made America an economic envy is responsible for the growing inequality and anger that is tearing the country apart.

Americans still loved technology, Khanna said, but too many of them felt locked out of the country’s economic future and were looking for someone to blame.

Without an intervention, he worried that wealth would continue to pile up in Silicon Valley and anger in the country would continue to grow. “It seems like every company in the world has to be here,” Larsen said. “It’s just painfully obvious that the blob is getting bigger.

The scientist and historian Vaclav Smil called Haber-Bosch “the most important technical invention of the 20th century.” Bosch had effectively removed the historical bounds on crop yields, so much so that he was widely credited with making “bread from air.” By some estimates, Bosch’s work made possible the lives of more than two billion human beings over the last 100 years.

They depend on electric fans to pull air into the ducts and over a special material, known as a sorbent, laced with granules that chemically bind with CO₂; periodic blasts of heat then release the captured gas from the sorbent, with customized software managing the whole catch-and-release cycle.

“The first thing they said was: ‘This will never work technically.’ And finally in 2017 we convinced them it works technically, since we built the big plant in Hinwil. But once we convinced them that it works technically, they would say, ‘Well, it will never work economically.’ ”For the moment, skeptics of Climeworks’s business plan are correct: The company is not turning a profit.

From a $15 national minimum wage to Medicare for all to free college tuition, Sanders’s opponents have embraced policies that were considered radical when he first proposed them during the 2016 campaign

Sanders doesn’t just warn against U.S. military intervention in Venezuela, as Warren and Gillibrand have. He warns against it while invoking the United States’ “long history of inappropriately intervening in Latin American countries.

In 2016, foreign policy was the area where Sanders distinguished himself least.

RULES? MORE RULES? REALLY? Isn’t life complicated enough, restricting enough, without abstract rules that don’t take our unique, individual situations into account? And given that our brains are plastic, and all develop differently based on our life experiences, why even expect that a few rules might be helpful to us all?

“I’ve got some good news…and I’ve got some bad news,” the lawgiver yells to them. “Which do you want first?” “The good news!” the hedonists reply. “I got Him from fifteen commandments down to ten!” “Hallelujah!” cries the unruly crowd. “And the bad?” “Adultery is still in.”

Maps of Meaning was sparked by Jordan’s agonized awareness, as a teenager growing up in the midst of the Cold War, that much of mankind seemed on the verge of blowing up the planet to defend their various identities. He felt he had to understand how it could be that people would sacrifice everything for an “identity,”