Have you ever wondered how something can mean the opposite of what it actually says? How is it that we don’t hear a literal meaning when we hear terms like black—a word that was once suggested as a…
3
Areo"How Language Works and Why Political Correctness Doesn't" by Cordula Simon (@potyomkinskaya)
55h
Over the past few months, I’ve written a number of pieces for outlets like Quillette and this magazine, Areo. While these magazines publish articles on a wide variety of topics—from political thoug…
3
Areo"The Engaged Left: The Emergence of a Political Movement" by Matt McManus (@MattPolProf)
3d
Rats in a Skinner Box Rats wired up to electrodes, housed in an experimental Skinner box, continually press a button to give themselves powerful, pleasurable sensations. The rats go into a veritabl…
4
Areo"Of Rats, Voles and Online Porn" by Declan Gernon
4d
Multiculturalism has been described as a melting pot and as the best alternative to assimilationist policies, which have been perceived as fraught, due to the fear that people from cultural minorit…
We humans take so much of reality for granted that it is often difficult to recognize which phenomena even require explanation. This is especially true of human behavior, as Steve Stewart-Williams …
The pursuit of happiness has become controversial — so much so that many will read this text and vehemently disagree with my pontifications. Happiness as a concept seems to have fallen out of favor…
1
Areo"Happiness Versus Meaning" by @PavloShopin
"Happiness is meaningful because the need to find it is deeply ingrained in us, part of what it means to be human."
8d
In her increasingly influential book, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, philosophy professor Kate Manne offers a radical new way to think about sexism and misogyny. Unfortunately, her account is me…
3
Areo"Untangling the Patriarchy Paradox: A Review of Kate Manne's Down Girl" by Oliver Waters (@olliewaters)
10d
Call-out culture, the act of publicly and collectively reprimanding someone for a past misstep, has longstanding roots in anthropological history. In our online society, in which the past cannot re…
3
Areo"What's Missing From Call-Out Culture: The Opportunity to Change" by Dan Melo.
10d
In spite of Barack Obama’s 2013 declaration that inequality is the “defining challenge of our time,” we remain paralyzed in our inability to have productive conversations about it, especially when …
2
Areo"All or Nothing: Why Our Discussions Over Inequality Go Nowhere" by @JohnIceland and @irakresh
11d
One of the fundamental problems with the social justice movement, especially given its puritanical and totalitarian proclivities, is that, in spite of its otherwise reasonable concerns about oppres…
In August 2018, I published an article in Quillette, in which I defended Roman Stoicism from its Christian critics. The article examined the ethical possibilities of Christianity as compared with R…
1
AreoBen Bassett argues that:"Stoic universalism is a plausible philosophical path through which something like human rights might eventually have been achieved in a non-Christianized Rome" in
"Ancient Stoicism, Human Rights and The Dignity of the Individual"
16d
Recently, while doing the dishes, I gazed upon a ratty, exhausted old sponge caked with debris—and was instantly reminded of those who have soaked up every bad idea that has collected in the sinkho…
1
Areo"Supposed Former Appropriation Junkie: Reinterpreting Alanis Morisette" by @kevancopeland
17d
Charles Darwin published the Origin of Species more than 150 years ago, in 1859, to share the discovery that the slow processes of evolution have shaped us, along with all other living things, over…
2
Areo"Aping Around: The Importance of our Animal Nature" by @erik_mostert
18d
As Cathy Young observes in a recent essay, the media has not given J. D. Salinger a warm welcome into his centennial year. Two days before the celebrated author’s birthday, the Washington Post took…
The Yumbo people walked here for centuries. Now I walk through a cloud, green dripping all around, the call of a toucan dopplering towards me before a blur of color reveals the bird itself. Water h…
As I have argued elsewhere (see here, here, and here), the theory of white fragility is based on the dubious premise of implicit bias, relies on research methodology that is underwhelming at best a…
3
Areo"The Theory of White Fragility: Scholarship or Proselytization?" by @jondavidchurch
22d
Can we solve the problem of inequality without compromising our commitment to free speech and the wellbeing of the individual? Can we advance the project of heterodoxy and civil discourse without n…
Stoicism has got a bad rap lately. In the popular imagination, it is associated with reluctance—particularly male reluctance—to show vulnerability or talk frankly about emotions. The new APA guidel…
3
Areo"In Praise of Stoicism: Derren Brown's Happy: Book Review" by @IonaItalia
26d
Core Tenets of Anti-Racist Scholarship-Activism. Racism exists today in both traditional and modern forms Racism is an institutionalized, multilayered, multilevel system that distributes unequal po…