Systematic attacks on the truth, supercharged through social media, trolling and cancel culture, have Americans angry, frustrated and unsure as to where to turn for knowledge. It’s a crisis of historic proportions, but author Jonathan Rauch argues we already have in place a structure from which to repel these assaults of disinformation. He locates it within the global network of …
Ignorance kills. It is the reason unvaccinated people are dying from COVID-19 and other diseases whose worst effects could be avoided. It is why people ignoring the consequences of climate change are wreaking havoc rather than being addressed. It is why people are victims of hate crimes and why teaching our children real history — not some whitewashed version that …
For my mother, who taught me how to love. Mom had PPA, a rare brain disorder for which there is no cure. It caused her to slowly lose her ability to recall the names of well, most everything eventually. One important distinction between PPA and other memory conditions like Alzheimer’s was that only very rarely and only inside the last …
There were plenty of reasons that would provoke a normal North Dakotan to vote for the bigoted puffy suit of peacock feathers known as Kevin Cramer over the impossibly more competent, intelligent and productive Heidi Heitkamp. Mainly it was the letter behind Heitkamp’s name that was a provocation. Cramer had no record, so he relied on the letter “T” for …
What is truth? Philosophers may have debated that since time began, but I’ll tell you how I define it: Truth is what I expect to read in my much-respected daily newspaper. Yet when we picked our paper off the doorstep this morning and shook it out of its little orange plastic sack, nearly the first thing we encountered was a …