Commentary on Downton Abbey

February 21, 2012

A version of this essay was published in the Washington Examiner newspaper on Sunday, February 26th. You can view that here. — Downton Abbey is a British-produced television drama on PBS that revolves around the lives of the occupants of a fictitious estate (the Downton Abbey) in the English countryside during the reign of King […]

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On Human Hatred

January 26, 2012

(Conspiracy movie poster. Source: Wikipedia) The 2001 film, Conspiracy, is a particularly brilliant and disturbing film about the Wannsee Conference, which was a meeting of top Nazi officials to determine the fate of millions of Jewish peoples throughout Europe during the Second World War. In a sense, the decisions made at the conference were the […]

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Uday Hussein’s Wretched, Tyrannical Existence

January 16, 2012

(The Devil’s Double theatrical poster – Source: Wikipedia) Suppose you live in a country where you have practically unlimited money and power. You can do whatever you want and not have to pay any real consequences for your actions. You have the power of life and death over the people in your country and can […]

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The Fog of War and the Limits to Human Understanding

January 6, 2012

(The Fog of War movie poster with Robert S. McNamara. Source: Wikipedia)   Errol Morris’ 2003 documentary, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, is above all a film on the limits of human understanding. It is about the reflections of a supreme rationalist on the irrational forces that […]

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College and Student Debt: Part Three: Work Experience

December 17, 2011

This is the third and final installment on what you can do as a college student to best prepare yourself to pay back your student debt when you graduate college. Parts one and two can be found here and here respectively. Before I delve into the final piece in this series, I wanted to reiterate […]

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College and Student Debt: Part Two: Extra-Curricular Activities

December 10, 2011

As we discussed in Part One, the major you choose will greatly impact your ability to pay off your student loans when you graduate college. The conclusion we reached was that the process for selecting a major was ultimately a trade-off between two competing needs: that to pay off your debt after graduation and that […]

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The Grand Perspective

December 6, 2011

One must never forget when misfortunes come that it is quite possible they are saving one from something much worse; or that when you make some great mistake, it may very easily serve you better than the best-advised decision. Life is a whole, and luck is a whole, and no part of them can be […]

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College and Student Debt: Part One: The Major Trade-off

November 17, 2011

One of the biggest concerns raised by those involved with the Occupy Wall Street movement, especially the younger people, is the cost of college tuition, room and board, and other related expenses. In one of the movement’s most iconic photos, a young woman laments in a sign “I am a student. When I graduate I […]

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The King’s Speech and Licensing

November 10, 2011

(The King’s Speech, (From L to R) Lionel, “Bertie”, and the Archbishop. Source: LA Times) In the King’s Speech, there is a scene toward the end of the film when Prince Albert, or “Bertie”, is preparing the specific details for his coronation at Westminster Abbey as King George VI. Right before the entrance of Lionel, […]

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Preparing the Public Mind

November 2, 2011

During the Revolutionary War, the weakness of the political bands that united the thirteen newly constituted states was apparent only to a very small minority of the American populace. Soldiers and military leaders in particular were acutely aware of the government’s limitations. Living federal policy, the soldiers were oftentimes without adequate clothing or shoes, even […]

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