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(03/06/17 6:58am)
Last month, the presidents of nearly fifty leading universities, including Duke, signed a letter condemning President Trump’s “travel ban” executive order as a threat to both “American higher education and the defining principles of our country.” For Duke and other participating universities to take the extraordinary step of official condemnation, and in such strong and categorical language, it is right to expect commensurately strong arguments in support of their position. Disappointingly, no such arguments exist in the university presidents’ letter, which indulges instead in the toxic blend of dogmatic rigidity and sloppy emotivism that increasingly passes for discourse on this controversial subject.
(04/16/12 9:35am)
In accordance with the inexorable momentum of specialization in the sciences, experts will continue to learn more and more about less and less until they end up knowing everything about nothing.
This astonishing possibility, reduced by now to the sort of PowerPoint profundity that bedazzles at “TED talks,” remains to be adequately interpreted.
(03/19/12 4:00am)
The phenomenal popularity of the viral video about the Ugandan rebel leader Joseph Kony has once again called attention to the moral outrage of the abduction of children to be trained as soldiers. In line with the nature of such a contagion (keeping with our viral metaphor), a considerable amount of blood spilt in far-flung Conradian thickets translates commensurately into ink spilt in our more familiar cloisters of idle privilege and infinite concern.
(02/20/12 5:00am)
Tocqueville’s always celebrated, often quoted and rarely read tome is in many ways just as much about aristocracy in Europe as it is about democracy in America. Specifically, it concerns the fact that America lacks an Old World aristocracy, and thus offers observers on the Continent a unique futuristic glimpse at what one might expect, as democracy’s promise of “equality of conditions” spreads rapidly throughout Europe.
(02/06/12 5:00am)
Two mathematicians are sitting in a bar, arguing about what degree of mathematical literacy one could expect from the average person. In a conspiratorial whisper, the optimistic mathematician instructs his waitress: “When my friend (A) comes back from the bathroom, I’m going to ask you a question, to which I want you to respond, ‘one-third x cubed.’” Sure enough, the friend returns, (no doubt after computing the base to his own natural log) and the mathematician bets that their waitress will be able to vindicate the average man by providing a correct answer to a proposed integral. He then calls the waitress and asks “What is the integral of x squared?” The waitress responds “one-third x cubed,” and, while walking away, turns back with a smile and adds “plus a constant!”
(01/23/12 11:00am)
Old souls are especially prone to dreary confessions. My own contribution is succumbing, quite precociously, to perhaps one of the most predictable of bucket-list cliches: skydiving. This bit of introductory humdrum is not to suggest that I managed to undergo this experience with a natural nonchalance, or anything short of vigorous reluctance. Were it not for the brave-blood and shaming persistence of my beloved I would not now be negotiating that fine line between prose-worthy hyperbole and prosaic understatement.
(12/12/11 11:00am)
In his 1894 essay “True Americanism,” President Theodore Roosevelt argued that, though cosmopolitanism may philosophically be ideal, the age of its political viability would prove so remote and futuristic as to embrace such fantastic and bizarrely incomprehensible positions as “look[ing] down upon and disregard[ing] monogamic marriage.”
(11/28/11 11:00am)
One major staple of former President Bush’s foreign policy was the notion that all human beings long for freedom, and that such longings are best achieved by—and instantiated in—democracy. As is well known, this noble principle stood as at least partial justification for the Iraq War. Though the war itself became overwhelmingly unpopular, most critics focused on the absence of “WMDs,” some version of neo-isolationism or conspiratorial sloganeering about oil, leaving President Bush’s political anthropology largely unscathed and unquestioned. Indeed, when the democracy question was raised at all, critics voiced their objection to the imposition of democracy though “the barrel of a gun,” and were thus largely concerned with the method of delivery rather than the sufficiency or universal appropriateness of democracy as such.
(11/14/11 11:00am)
Last Wednesday marked the 22nd anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. That this auspicious date has come and gone with such obliging unobtrusiveness would seem to belie its status as the most significant political-historical event of a young man’s lifetime—confirmation, perhaps, that the petty pace of time trivializes history itself. But this glib explanation is not and cannot be the whole story; for the annual national catharsis that takes place on Sept. 11 speaks favorably to our persistent capacities for commemoration and reflection.
(10/31/11 9:00am)
The success of multiple recent books advocating for a kind of “new atheism” has been something of a phenomenon in American popular culture. The latest entry, courtesy of Duke’s very own Professor Alex Rosenberg, is “The Atheist’s Guide to Realty: Enjoying Life without Illusions.” As its sanguine title might suggest, this book aims to develop a positive, prescriptive account of atheism to complement the more typically offered and often tiresome and unproductive arguments against religion. Sure, the “a-theist” must deny theism, but what ought he to affirm?
(10/17/11 9:00am)
One distinguishing feature of the young adult is his novel tendency to reach into the past and identify one or two serendipitous, yet utterly formative childhood encounters. Of course, there is a fine line between discovery and invention when it comes to self-psychoanalyzing, and my necessarily hazy retrospection becomes still more so as I confront the defining moment of my own privileged upbringing—enjoying a Singapore Sling at the Longbar of Raffles Hotel Singapore, site of the drink’s invention by the estimable Ngiam Tong Boon in the early 20th century. This was indeed a boon to my 8-year-old palate, and with it an enduring passion for cocktails was born.
(10/03/11 9:00am)
Recent events in local politics have renewed a campus-wide debate on gay marriage. To call what has taken place at Duke a “debate,” however, is to use that term generously. Most of what I have seen (these pages included) resembles not so much preaching to the choir as it does joining in the ever-swelling chorus of self-righteous condemnation. Despite my personal support for gay marriage, the near unanimity of this position disturbs me almost as much as the obnoxious, dogmatic and utterly dismissive manner in which it is expressed. Indeed, listening to the discussion on campus, one is left with the impression that the only possible explanation for unorthodoxy on gay marriage is superstitious bigotry, if not downright hatred.
(09/19/11 9:00am)
Anyone who has visited Philadelphia is familiar with its famous “Old City” neighborhood, which, as many foreign tourists (especially European visitors) are eager to point out, is in fact relatively young by international standards. Nevertheless, the Old City can justify its title because it is the site of Independence Hall, the birthplace of the Constitution of the United States, the second-oldest written constitution still in use. The constitution of the Republic of San Marino (yes, it’s a real country), the Statutes of 1600, holds the honor of being the oldest, though the proud Sammarinese did not receive any actual rights until the signing of the Declaration of Citizens Rights of 1974, which was modeled after the United States’ Bill of Rights. Indeed, it is not only our Constitution’s age, but also its use as a blueprint for dozens of other countries’ constitutions that is so remarkable.
