Category: issues

“The greatest difficulty often lies in homicide and death penalty trials, in which jurors not only share the burden of imposing guilt (or even death), but are necessarily confronted with the loss of life that led to the case. Some jurors even report physical ailments, including headaches, nightmares, and symptoms consistent with post-traumatic stress disorder.”

“Building a government, it turns out, is a more complex challenge than much of Silicon Valley would have you believe. Now, Thiel and other high-profile Silicon Valley investors are carefully taking stock of the anti-government view they helped popularize.”

“Palmyra is an ancient Roman site whose significance and value is exceeded by very few others: those in Rome itself, Pompeii, possibly Petra in Jordan. Its temples, colonnades and tombs, its theatre and streets are extensive, exquisite, distinctive, rich. The loss of Palmyra would be a cultural atrocity greater than the destruction of the Buddhas in Bamiyan. It is hard to think of deliberate vandalism to equal it, despite the grim examples offered by the last hundred years.”

“[F]aculty voices are silenced and adjunct faculty expands, affecting their overall ability to advocate for students. We seven students lost time, money, and trust in a classic bait-­and-­switch, and the larger community lost an exemplary funding model that attempted to rectify at least some of these economic disparities. What we experienced is the true ‘disruption’ of this accelerating trend.”

The conservative-leaning governing coalition is reallocating half of the Australia Council for the Arts’ budget to a new “national program for excellence in the arts” directly controlled by the arts minister, George Brandis (who is also the attorney general).

“Implicit in the notion that an apartment like mine can ‘be gay’ – and that you, despite any politically correct training against saying so, could easily recognize it as such – is an understanding of gayness as something more than a basic sexual orientation. … Gayness may be found not just in whom you sleep with, but also in the sort of sheets you insist on sleeping between.” A longread by J. Bryan Lowder.

A dialogue between the two editors of Slate‘s LGBT blog, Outward: June Thomas and J. Bryan Lowder.

Leading British scientists and engineers are calling on the incoming government to give arts education the same value as science, technology, engineering and maths. It comes after education secretary Nicky Morgan said last year that choosing to study arts subjects could “hold [students] back for the rest of their lives”.

“Like a prospector who discovers a gold mine then watches others pull riches from it, the Philadelphia arts and culture community has been looking around and wondering when its turn will come. Center City is a boomtown, its vibrant street life and desirable real estate in large part a consequence of arts pioneers taking a chance on new facilities and expanded missions more than two decades ago.”

“Academia is the Titanic. I have suggested that schools stop spending so much money and labor on useless research in the humanities, and instead shift that labor and money to teaching.”