Lincoln’s “Gettysburg” speech as PowerPoint
Too bad Abraham Lincoln had only old-tech. Advice for presenters everywhere. Click image to begin:
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Humor
Where I should buy my next car?
I saw this license plate in Chicago: And apparently Rand and Hicks really do intersect in Chicago: I infer that the philosophy gods and the car guys are trying to tell me something. Related: My close reading of Rand’s classic essay, “Man’s Rights,” in the Philosophers, Explained series.
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The Sexual One Percent
The Sexual One Percent We have a fairness problem in the United States: The pleasures of sex are unequally distributed across the population. Data from scholarly publications reveal the following: * Artists self-report having sex 2.3 times as often as non-artists. * Gay males have significantly more sex than heterosexual males. * Regular church-goers, especially
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Cassius on Roman versus Greek superiority
The Greeks, according to Cassius: “They are an arrogant people, I’ve always found. I remember one of them telling me they had invented everything, from gods to sex. I pointed out that Romans took their ideas and improved upon them. Ares became Mars, Zeus became Jupiter. And of course, although we could not improve on
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Contemptible European Philosophy — exam questions
[Humor alert: When I last taught Contemporary European Philosophy, I offered this alternative final exam.] Contemptible European Philosophy Dr. ShicksAlternative (Reality) Exam 1. Identify the correct choice. Jean-Paul Sartre was a(n):a) Existentialist.b) Essentialist.c) Excellent way to put yourself to sleep.d) Guy who knew how to have his way with the ladies. 2. “Why does the
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The best footnote ever: Freud on putting out fires
Traditional sex roles have it that the woman looks after the family hearth, tending the cooking and raising the children, while the man goes off to hunt and fight. Many explanations can be offered for these assigned roles, but to my knowledge Sigmund Freud has the most, uummmm, interesting explanation for why men are not
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Kant’s joke, according to Nietzsche
Thus spake Friedrich: “Kant’s joke. — Kant wanted to prove, in a way that would dumbfound the whole world, that the whole world was right: that was the secret joke of this soul. He wrote against the scholars in favor of popular prejudice, but for scholars and not for the people.” Nietzsche, *The Gay Science*,
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James Joyce’s *Ulysses* edited for sensitive readers
Happy to announce the results of a new project to take Joyce’s famous Ulysses and render it safe for modern readers. The 732-page book was published in 1922 before standards of appropriate language were known and enforced. So for this centennial edition, a team of readers was commissioned to bring this historically and literarily important
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