Evil – How Can We Think About It?

“To say that a murderer has killed because she or he is evil is really to point to an absence of motive. Far from the usual muddle of human motivation, evil has a cold, horrifying purity. Phrases like ‘unthinkable evil’ or ‘unspeakable evil’ highlight the way the word is used to say the unsayable, to explain the inexplicable. So how can we think about evil?”

How To Raise A Little Conservative (Or Liberal)

“Providing the best evidence yet to back up a decades-old theory, researchers writing in the journal Psychological Science report a link between a mother’s attitude toward parenting and the political ideology her child eventually adopts. In short, authoritarian parents are more prone to produce conservatives, while those who gave their kids more latitude are more likely to produce liberals.”

Saudi Arabia’s Underground Cinema

“In a country with no public cinemas and where only a few films have been shown to the public in more than three decades, it is a radical step: a handful of film-makers in Saudi Arabia has launched a secret cinema group, showing their own films that explore social and political issues such as women’s rights, the lives of migrant workers, urbanisation and the belief in black magic.”

Why Milwaukee Ballet Did Away With The Principal-Soloist-Corps System

Artistic director Michael Pink: “I don’t subscribe to the class structure; I mean especially an organization where there’s so few dancers – if you have 25, 24 dancers, they’re all going to have to work equally well … You see the obvious people that can do those things, and I think we have less ego and less ego issues – we don’t have any issues with anybody who assumes they’re greater than anyone else, and that’s lovely.”