Browsing: Lens_ideas

Living in transition, between cultures, we are discovering who we are.

An East German border guard keeps a lookout for people trying to escape from communist Berlin to freedom on the other side of the wall. US National Archives How well do we know the countries we call home? It seems obvious that travel and study would improve a person’s knowledge of geography. But could attitudes […]

Our picture of man’s early home has been skewed by modern preconceptions.

Luca Cerabona via Flickr You’ve been waiting for today for weeks. You paid more than you could really afford for tickets to a football game, and the day is finally here. But when you look outside your window early Sunday morning, you realize you’d rather not go. It’s snowing, it’s 20 degrees below zero, and […]

Richard Holmes gets high on ballooning.

In the nearly 25 years that I spent in school, I produced countless term papers, exams, and presentations, nearly all of which of no value to anyone else. And that goes for most of the 20 million or so college and graduate students currently pursuing higher education in the United States. They produce thousands of […]

A reflection on Jacob Bronowski’s “The Ascent of Man.”

Layers of history beckon with imperfect memories.

A family therapist uncovers the cost of keeping silent.

Jorge Louis Borges once described an empire that wanted to build a map. But the maps they had seen before were not precise enough. They had too much compression and approximation. There was too much inexactitude. And so the empire eventually made a map of the empire that was the size of the empire, and […]