Here are a few pieces from around the web that I've been enjoying this week:

A nice piece reflecting on the Iranian Revolution and the Islamic Republic of Iran.  What has it accomplished, and...

Not everything is for everyone. Platitudes like this are simultaneously the most eye-rollingly obvious critters running around the ecosystem of human language, but also, sometimes, when scrutinized...

Not much, unsurprisingly, according to this Pew report.  I see no reason to doubt the report, as it makes a great deal of sense.  The details are worth wandering through, but as this blog post point...

This website will be one I keep returning to.  It gathers together a great deal of work by and about Bernard Williams, a major anglophone philosopher of the twentieth century.

"Analytic...

An interesting piece on a new book that has to hack through a lot of cliches to get there.  Good lines: “the best of what the university has to offer lies less in its specific power to advance...

This piece has really got me thinking.  The idea that we're too passive in the face of things that want to claim our attention is an important one.  Here's a trick they offer, to get you to gain...

This essay by Randolph Bourne, one of the great public intellectuals of American life, has been on my mind a great deal these past several years, and in the past few days, with our President...

American freedom is deeply related to American slavery, as Edmund Morgan famously noted almost fifty years ago to white people (though African-Americans were well aware of this, long before that)....

For a world very deeply interested in making everything conversible, it's interesting that some things are still quite fraught to discuss.  I am reminded of this by two recent stories.  First, here...

This piece is a bit shallow, and trades on a simplistic understanding of Protestant Mainline decline (there's a really interesting story here waiting to be told), but the final conceit is...