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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...
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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...
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By Rob Dunn in Smithsonian "Cultures differ in all sorts of ways—their greetings, clothing, expectations about how children should behave, coming-of-age rituals, expressions of sexuality, numbers of husbands or wives, beliefs in god, gods, or lack thereof. People celebrate but also wage wars about...
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by Mike Barrowcliffe in Times Online "Professor Gail Heyman, of the University of California, questioned 130 students and their parents about parental lying. She was surprised to find that more than 80 per cent of parents lied at some point, even those who insisted to their children that it was...
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by John Tierney in The New York Times "Does religion have a future? Who looks more like an evolutionary dead end: the religious American or the agnostic European? Or will both give way to some sort of compromise — people bound by new institutions that provide the social benefits of religion without...
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By Susanne Beyer and Lothar Gorris in Spiegel Online " SPIEGEL: Still, you are famous for being able to explain your passions … Eco: … but not by talking about myself. Look, ever since the days of Aristotle, we have been trying to define things based on their essence. The definition of man? An animal...
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by Dave Johns from Slate "The notion that a man's mug reveals his character is an age-old bias. Since Aristotle, people have thought it possible to infer personality traits from the face and body, an art known as physiognomy . The practice grew popular in the years after the American Revolution...
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by Michael Torrice from Science "Some people can read your face and know you've had a bad day. Others seem oblivious. Now, researchers have pinpointed a genetic explanation for why some people are better empathizers than others. Empathy is crucial for our everyday social interactions. Neuroscientists...
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By Jerome Groopman "Born in Belgrade, in what was then Yugoslavia, Maja Matarić originally wanted to study languages and art. After she and her mother moved to the United States, in 1981, her uncle, who had immigrated some years earlier, pressed her to concentrate on computers. As a graduate student...
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By: Kathleen McGowan "Why does being bad feel so good? Pride, envy, greed, wrath, lust, gluttony, and sloth: It might sound like just one more episode of The Real Housewives of New Jersey, but this enduring formulation of the worst of human failures has inspired great art for thousands of years...