By Adam Liptak from The NewYork Times. "'Americans to this day don’t fully appreciate how Europeans regard privacy,' said Jane Kirtley, who teaches media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota . 'The reality is that they consider privacy a fundamental human right.' Google...

By Nick Clegg from Gaurdian . "I basically believe people are born good. How can you think anything else when you see the innocence of young children? Of course, people are born with different, sometimes difficult, personalities. But fundamental optimism about human nature has always been a driving...

By Rachel Lehmann-Haupt from Slate . "The sperm bank protected his anonymity, just as it promised. But that did not mean he couldn't be found. In an age of sophisticated genetic testing, the concept of anonymity is rapidly fading. With some clever sleuthing—tests that can track down ancestral...

By David Crary from The Washington Post. "Vancouver, British Columbia -- A carbon-neutral torch relay. A multimillion dollar partnership with Canada's aboriginals. Bouquets for medal winners made by former prostitutes and drug addicts. Even before the first event - and the first big protest...

By Rachel Rettner from msnbc . Other people's good deeds inspire the rest of us, study suggests. "The warm and fuzzy feelings you may experience after watching others perform virtuous deeds may in turn lead you to act altruistically as well, according to a new study based on the results of two...

by Geoff Pursinger from The Tigard Times "Holocaust survivor Alter Wiener stood before a group of more than 2,000 students at Tigard High School, Jan. 11, delivering a message of tolerance and forgiveness at the school’s annual Human Rights Assembly. Wiener, 83, spoke about his early life growing...

by Daniel Mendelsohn for The New Yorker "Unseemly self-exposures, unpalatable betrayals, unavoidable mendacity, a soupçon of meretriciousness: memoir, for much of its modern history, has been the black sheep of the literary family. Like a drunken guest at a wedding, it is constantly mortifying its...

From The Economist "What do the following have in common: the bar code, congestion charging, the cervical Pap smear and the internet? All emerged from work done at America’s pre-eminent research universities. The central contention of Jonathan Cole’s book is that these mighty institutions are “creative...

Interview by Nathan Gardels for New Perspectives Quarterly Czeslaw Milosz, the great Polish poet and essayist who died in 2004, was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980. Just after the publication of A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry and his memoir, Road-side Dog...

By Stephen Faris from Time. "There's a scene in the video game 24 , based on the popular television show, in which the player takes on the role of government agent Jack Bauer and tortures a terrorist. To extract a set of codes, Bauer shoots the man in the gut, slams his head on the table, refuses...

By Gabriel Ignatow. This article argues that a modified version of Bourdieu's habitus concept can generate insights into moral culture and the ways people use culture to make changes in their lives. If revised in light of recent findings from cognitive neuroscience, the habitus allows for the analysis...

"What is a good life? What does it mean to be a good person? Richard White answers these questions by considering aspects of moral goodness through the virtues: courage, temperance, justice, compassion, and wisdom. White explores how moral virtues affect and support social movements such as pacifism...

Abstract: In a world of continued and expanding empire, does sociocultural anthropology in itself offer grounds for moral and social criticism? One line in anthropological thought leads to cultural relativism and an awareness that a cloud of alternative possibilites surrounds any moral code. However...

This book lucidly explains how the Parallel Lives of Plutarch (c. AD 45-120) are more than mere `sources' for history. The Lives offer us a unique insight into the reception of Classical Greece and Republican Rome in the Greek world of the second century AD. They also explore and challenge issues...