By Eric Le Roy
Content 18+ Artem’s recent discourse on ‘Traditional Values’ is annoyingly accurate in many ways. So why ‘annoyingly’? I think it is because – although Artem throws a few alms in the direction of ‘tradition’ toward the end, the article, faithful to the author’s proclivity, remains top heavy in the direction of the political and perhaps just a tad neglectful in its allowances for the psychological … Read the rest
Content 18+ Human beings have always harbored a profound affection for nostalgia. We carefully cherish relics, meticulously preserve artifacts, and laboriously attempt to recreate the past, investing it with an almost spiritual passion—typically reserved for matters of immense importance or significant unease. Today, the phrase “traditional values” has emerged prominently as the soothing balm generously applied to society’s wounds, anxieties born from rapid technological, cultural, and social transformations. Beneath its … Read the rest
By Eric Le Roy
Content 18+ As I was riding in the car with my wife yesterday evening, heading for the Dog Shop and the supermarket, there was some pretty cool rap music on the radio. It was rather strange: slow and soft instead of punching at you like a back alley beatdown, but the usual rhyming patterns were there, and as with the best of that genre, you can … Read the rest
Content 16+ Imagine a future historian—perhaps an AI with a wry sense of humor—sifting through the ruins of our civilization. It finds two things in abundance: a feverish atmosphere and mountains of garbage. The air is thick with greenhouse gases that our factories and cars so generously pumped out, and the land (and sea) is … Read the rest
By Eric Le Roy
Content 18+ As we study history together, I often show documentary films to my students. When these films are about the distant past, there is a voice (or person-moderator) who walks us through the information, using whatever illustrations can be mustered. But as we get nearer to modern times the documentaries come to life: actual human action in black and white. From the late 19th … Read the rest
