The prayer added to the liturgy during Hanukkah thanks God for the victory over the Syrian Greeks by the Hasmoneans, a victory of “the weak over the strong, the few over the many.” While the Jews did indeed win the war, the conflict between Judaism and Hellenism...
Assessing the sheer carnage of World War I and the new and deadlier ways of killing, H. G. Wells concluded that he had lived to see the “war to end all wars.” He was wrong. Wells died in 1946, having lived through the second - and even bloodier - world war. Wells...
A mammalian biology professor once assigned his international students a paper on elephants. The French students chose as his topic “The Cuisine of the Elephant.” The Italian student wrote on “The Romantic Life of the Elephant.” The German student wrote on “The...
Iceland is a country of less than 350,000 people and yet, remarkably, it has not only qualified for the 2018 FIFA World Cup of soccer, it even tied mighty Argentina, a perennial soccer powerhouse and a nation whose population is 130 times its size. Much has been...
While waiting for the bus one frigid morning in January, another passenger-to-be turned to me and complained about the awful weather. I shrugged and said: “It’s only weather.” I was just as cold as my fellow traveler, just not as discontented. After all, it’s Canada....
In 1969 Laurence J. Peter formulated what has become recognized as the Peter Principle. Peter observed that the tendency in most organizational hierarchies, such as that of a corporation for every employee to rise in the hierarchy through promotion until they reach...
Professor Martin Seligman of the Department of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania (along with science writer John Tierney) reviewed in a June 4, 2017 article in the New York Times the latest advances in brain research. It now appears that a central function...
On display at the Royal Ontario Museum until January 28, 2018 is the Evidence Room. The exhibit depicts architect Robert Jan van Pelt’s detailed and important analysis of the Holocaust. Van Pelt, an architectural historian and founder of the science of forensic...
A judge found Michelle Carter guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the death of Conrad Roy III, her boyfriend. Carter’s weapon? Words. Conrad Roy III filled his truck with carbon monoxide in a Fairhaven, Massachusetts store parking lot just over three years ago. But...
Norma McCorvey died of a heart ailment in Katy, Texas in February 17, 2017 at the age of 69. Her claim to fame was that her pregnancy and subsequent pursuit of a legal and safe abortion - though her life was not in jeopardy - resulted in the landmark 1973 U.S. Supreme...