Category: issues

“For some people, at least, feeling another’s pain is insufficient: You also experience the urge to harm the person they are in conflict or competition with.”

For observers who fear the worst, George Washington’s past experience absorbing smaller institutions offers ample evidence for concern.

“Before leaving, the regime soldiers scrawled the same chilling graffiti on the mosque’s water dispenser that was starting to appear all over the country. ‘Al-Assad aw nahriqhu.’ ‘Assad, or we will burn it.'”

“As the Kremlin deepens its geopolitical standoff with the West, it’s also tightening its grip over the internet and media at home to better fight what officials here call an ‘information war’ with its adversaries.” Officials argue that their goal isn’t to isolate Russia from the World Wide Web but to prevent other nations from kicking Russia out.

“What makes the tale of Charlie and His Orchestra so twisted is that the Nazis shot back American songs at the Allies, albeit doctored with especially demented propaganda lyrics. … The most frequent target of Charlie’s venom isn’t the Jews, but Winston Churchill.”

Among those who compared generic products, “individuals who attended religious services frequently were more likely to generate religious words than those who did not,” the researchers write. However, among those who compared brand-name items, “this pattern disappeared.”

“I don’t see a lot of honest debate going on in our field – at least not public debate. Maybe it’s happening somewhere, but it isn’t highly visible and readily apparent to me. I wonder if that kind of challenging of assumptions and holding people accountable for their positions is going on out of the public window in our organizations – from funders to researchers to service groups to academia. I wonder if the kind of serious debate that is healthy for arriving at well thought out conclusions on which to base decision making is happening behind closed doors – because I don’t see it happening much in our public arenas.”

“If we acknowledge that people differ in what they have to contribute, then we have an argument for a society in which all human beings are entitled to a life that includes access to decent housing, health care, and education, simply because they are human. Our abilities might not be identical, and our needs surely differ, but our basic human rights are universal.”

Michael Harris: “I think that we’ve gone through this very giddy ride of absorbing new communication technologies, and what we’re hitting now is a point where we have to start becoming intelligent about our media diets in the same way that we had to become intelligent about our food diets after we got a super abundance of sugar and fats at our disposal.”

“Lincoln Center’s move comes as overall corporate philanthropy is dwindling and big companies’ support of the arts is eroding. Corporate giving fell nearly 2% in 2013, according to Giving USA. Meanwhile, the share of corporate philanthropy dedicated to the arts fell to 5.3% in 2012 from 8.8% in 2007, according to CECP, a coalition of chief executives working to improve society.”