Looking Back On Where We’ve Been

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Celebrating Hank Aaron. For Real This Time.
This year’s MLB All-Star festivities are giving Hank Aaron the kind of recognition he always deserved. During the Home Run Derby, National League players will wear number 44, Aaron’s iconic number, while the American League will wear number 3 in honor of Babe Ruth. The tribute isn’t just symbolic—it’s poetic. The Derby falls on July 14, the number of Ruth’s career home…
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“On the One Hand…”
The Perils and Possibilities of AI President Truman used to joke about how his economic advisors were always telling him, “on the one hand this… but on the other hand that.” What I need, he said, “is a one-handed economist.” It’s a good line. But he knew some issues are too complex, too uncertain, and too consequential to be constrained to a…
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Resistance: Germans Who Stood Up To Nazism
It’s hard to step out from the crowd or turn around and deliberately march against it. Even in a free society, where the punishments for civil disobedience tend to be fairly mild, the majority go with the flow. It is easy to imagine yourself as an armchair historical figure and believe, “I wouldn’t have gone along with…” slavery, sexual exploitation, witch hunts,…
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Extremism, Not the Left or Right, Is The Problem
Why democracy depends on staying out of the gutter On June 14, 2025, elected officials in Minnesota were shot in their homes as they slept. The facts were unclear but that didn’t stop the certainty. Within hours, a familiar pattern emerged: prominent voices on the political right rushed to blame the political left and attack it, en masse. Elon Musk posted that…
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Don’t Let the Bastards Grind You Down
Echoes from the Second World War It was the second-to-last episode of The Handmaid’s Tale that got me thinking about all this. June (Elisabeth Moss), bruised but unbroken, shouts to the crowd before she is about to be hanged from a crane: “Don’t let the bastards grind you down!” A line of defiance. A curse hurled upward. A call to action. A…
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