Tag Archives: progress

Gays Cannot Be Excluded From Juries Just Because They Are Gay

Gay and lesbian dignity and equality in the United States continues its historic progress. This is in The Wall Street Journal today: The Constitution prohibits excluding someone from a jury based on sexual orientation, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday, … Continue reading

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“Robo sapiens”

O brave new world! In the science section of The New York Times this week is a report on Atlas, a recently designed robot built for use by the Pentagon: “People love the wizards in Harry Potter or ‘Lord of the Rings,’ but … Continue reading

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Sunita Williams’s Guided Tour of the International Space Station

This is life in space with departing International Space Station Commander, Sunita Williams. A few hours after making this video, she returned to Earth, landing in Kazakhstan with two of her colleagues, one from Russia and one from Japan. __________ If … Continue reading

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2012: The Best Year In All Of Human History?

It sounds like a joke, but that’s the thesis of the lead article in The Spectator’s 2012 Christmas issue: Never has there been less hunger, less disease or more prosperity. The West remains in the economic doldrums, but most developing … Continue reading

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Gray on Pink(er): Because of Our Evolution, the Irrational We’ll Always Have With Us

John Gray thinks Steven Pinker’s thesis in his new book—in which Pinker argues that the world is progressing toward an ever less violent future—is deluded. In the Jacob-wrestle between Enlightenment rationality and our evolution-formed imperatives, Gray is betting that our … Continue reading

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The Truth of Progress: Steven Pinker Interviewed by Reason Magazine

Steven Pinker’s new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, on the decline of violence through history, is great—maybe his best book ever. Well, on second thought, let’s say it ties his The Blank Slate. That’s saying a lot. Here’s Pinker talking about The … Continue reading

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Think big thoughts: two images from the 1909 Paris Air Show held at the Grand Palais

Maybe your life’s vision is set too low. Take the Paris Air Show of 1909 for inspiration, and think of how far people with vision, intelligence, ambition, and imagination managed to reach in just the past one hundred years. Can you imagine … Continue reading

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A delicious deconstruction of John Gray by A.C. Grayling

Of John Gray’s Black Mass, A.C. Grayling writes that the book: tells us that the world is in a bad way and that there is nothing we can do about it. Perhaps we can infer from this that his aim … Continue reading

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America’s future is sunny? I hope David Brooks is right

In a recent essay for the New York Times, David Brooks claims that the next half-century in America looks damn sunny: [T]he fact is, despite all the problems, America’s future is exceedingly bright. Over the next 40 years, demographers estimate that … Continue reading

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Evolutionary Progress: From Darwin to Hitler?

Richard Weikart is Professor of Modern European History at California State University, Stanislaus. He has a new book that has just come out. It is titled Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress  (Palgrave Macmillan 2009). I got the book … Continue reading

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40 Years Ago, on July 20, 1969, Human Beings Stepped onto the Moon

And here’s what the front page of the New York Times looked like on July 21, 1969: I can’t help but hear, in the headline, an echo of the ancient Roman Imperium: We came, we saw, we conquered. And here’s … Continue reading

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