As I was sitting in the Jury holding area last week, I began to read volume one of the "Centennial History of the Civil War" by Bruce Catton: "The Coming Fury". Between periods of listening for my number to be called, I plunged into the 1860 presidential primaries. Those left…
Need proof? Check out Romney's own carefully crafted words. Let Glenn Greenwald be your tour guide. These are just some of the powers which Romney -- and, among the respondents, Romney alone -- claimed the President possesses, either by explicitly claiming them or refusing to repudiate them when asked directly:…
Missouri's first State Poet Laureate. Walter Bargen. I can't tell you how pleased I am by this. Walter is a first-rate poet and, just if not more importantly, a decent human being. He will be formally introduced on February 13th at the state capitol. After that, he will serve a…
I came across an article a few days ago written by John Hockenberry, an award-winning journalist who once worked for NBC's Dateline and is now a fellow at MIT's Media Lab. Titled "You Don't Understand Our Audience": What I learned about network television at Dateline NBC, this article is a…
In this entertaining video, Ken Robinson discusses the critical role creativity should play in education. Robinson is the author of Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative. Robinson argues that Western education has failed to teach young people to think critically about life, art, culture, and humanism. Instead, most education is geared to producing workers. In the process, most education systems downplay or even disparage art: "Don't do music; you're not going to be a musician." Many brilliant people are taught to think that they are failures because the things they do well--often valuable things-are not valued by most schools. Robinson argues that we've got to develop a new "ecology" of education--we've got to stop "strip-mining young minds."