From Paleolithic to now — life expectancy at birth
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Where women first got the vote and when
When women got the vote fully at the national level: 1893 New Zealand 1902 Australia 1906 Finland 1913 Norway 1915 Denmark 1917 Canada 1918 Austria, Germany, Poland, Russia 1919 Netherlands 1920 United States 1921 Sweden 1928 Britain, Ireland All other countries: Granted later or not yet granted. Note: Six of the fifteen are British or former British colonies; the other nine are northern European. (Also worth
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How Randy Newman Solved Stanley Fish’s Credibility Problem
Stanley Fish, postmodern provocateur, gave a talk at Indiana University when I was a graduate student there in the late 1980s. He was then working on what would become There’s No Such Thing As Free Speech, And It’s a Good Thing, Too. Fish’s theme was social construction and oppression: We all are products of our
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How Rachmaninoff’s composing was hurt by the Soviet Union
Yet another reason to despise the Russian experiment in socialism. After the communist revolution, the great composer Sergei Rachmaninoff went into exile, losing his home and other property to the Soviets — along with his publisher and his status in Russia as leading musician of his generation. Starting over in the West was a challenge,
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How to Tame Religious Terrorists [Good Life series]
Defeating an enemy such as politicized Islam is a multi-front battle—police, military, diplomatic, cultural, and philosophical. Any fight is triggered by short-term, local disagreements. But long-term, generalized conflicts are always about abstract principles in collision. As with neo-Nazis, Communist revolutionaries, violent environmentalists, bomb-the-government anarchists, and others—our conflicts with them are intellectual in origin. Terrorism is
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Graffiti at Aldeen Dam, 2017
Each spring brings a new outburst of graffiti activity at Aldeen Park here in Rockford. Regular themes are who loves whom, religion, death motifs, and comments about sex. This year I learned that Jesus kills demons, Nathan and Angela are an item, All you need is Love, and A bag of donuts makes a party.
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First Chipotle, now Berkeley — egalitarianism wins again
Six years ago, I snarkily conjectured that the egailtarians would go after libraries on the grounds that most of their content was inaccessible to the deaf and blind. That was meant to be a reductio ad absurdum. But now the Department of Justice has gone after UC Berkeley’s online library for precisely that reason. The
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