Debates

Ownership is freedom. We may do what we want with what we have. We believe we own our bodies and may do with them as we will. But is that …
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Crews of chisel-bearing operatives were hired to hammer out the auspicious image of Lenin — symbolically gripping the hands of an African-American and a Russian soldier and workers — from …
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Why is there Twitter? One generic answer concerns SMS protocol: Twitter takes text messages (including the 140-character limit designed three decades ago by Friedrich Hillebrand to permit cell carriers to …
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The search for a gay gene has intensified since the publication in the early 90’s of the now famous research by Simon LeVay and Dean Hamer. Their findings were reconfirmed …
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The situation is fluid and rapidly changing, information is not easily available through official news agencies (which, in and of itself, is remarkable), but it appears that the formidable migratory …
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PREFATORY NOTE

A few years ago I wrote a series of short lyrical mediations about objects that appeared in a collection called The Book of Marvels: A Compendium of Everyday …
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THE WORLD TODAY appears divided into two opposing camps: the realm of Good and the empire of Evil, the free world against the world of slavery, “crusaders” vs. “martyrs.” Yet, …
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THERE ARE THOSE EXCEPTIONAL INSTANCES, in which a date or a place stands for a particular event that happened then and there. “9/11” and “Chernobyl” symbolize in a recognizable shorthand …
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SOCIAL MEDIA SUCH AS FACEBOOK, Snapchat, and Tinder were invented as part of a culture that objectifies and denigrates girls and women. It is well known that the Facebook founder …
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WE SEEK FREEDOM. Is this not the rallying cry of American democracy, endlessly repeated, endlessly intoned as its most durable credo? We seek freedom to do as we want without …
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