If you’re like me, you can become frustrated easily with the electoral process.*  The people who run for political office often aren’t necessarily the most qualified people for the job, and many spend so much time fundraising and campaigning for reelection that actual policy making decisions (and the rationale they use to buttress these decisions) [...]

This is something I didn’t expect to happen anytime soon: ‘A group of 23 Communist Party elders in China has written a letter calling for an end to the country’s restrictions on freedom of speech. The letter says freedom of expression is promised in the Chinese constitution but not allowed in practice. They want people [...]

Today Ezra Klein talked about the perennial disconnect between Americans’ political self-identification and the kinds of policies they actually support.  The problem is that, while America calls itself a center-right nation – that is, a majority of Americans consistently self-identifies as conservative – Americans also are overwhelmingly in favor of liberal, welfare state policies.  So what are we—conservatives [...]

Every now and then, the NYT’s philosophy column, The Stone, will run a piece that is only tangentially related to philosophy, if that.  Yesterday they ran another such piece, but this one is actually worth reading.  In it, philosopher Robert Pippin argues that the quasi-scientific, “research-based” paradigm that drives scholarship in English departments toward things like critical theory has some [...]

Yesterday I wrote about Linda Bacon’s fantastic talk on Health At Every Size (HAES), but a couple more things have occurred to me in the meantime that seemed worth sharing.  Check out the original post if you haven’t already; Bacon and HAES are both truly fascinating.  I’ll warn you ahead of time, though: this post [...]

You heard me right, folks.  According to philosopher David Sosa, happiness is not just the way we feel inside, but also has something to do with the external world. To explain what he means, he calls on a famous thought experiment devised by Robert Nozick back in 1974: Suppose there were an experience machine that [...]