During a stop on a cross-country drive this year, I watched a crowd of long, pale fish erupt from the surface of the Lost Sea, the hemisphere’s largest underground lake. They were rainbowless rainbow trout, and a young boatman was …

This symposium opens with a provocation: What are animals for? The question almost solicits its own rejection, invoking as it does one of the central tenets of much animal advocacy: animals are not for anything, and they ought to be …

I didn’t know it at the time, of course, but the older sister who directed most of my childhood games was a future novelist. A special incantation transported us to Fairyland, where the rooms of our house became the chambers …

Every year, the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services releases data on the number of animals killed at the Commonwealth’s animal shelters, including the facility operated by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), located in Norfolk, Virginia. …

What sorts of philosophical problems do we face because of the existence of non-human animals? Most humane people would agree that their existence presents us with some moral and legal quandaries. And recently, but only recently, philosophers have taken a …

Bill Ayers was a professor of education at the University of illinois at Chicago until 2010, and he has published several books on pedagogy, including Teaching Toward Freedom (2010) and To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher (2001). Before becoming …

Near the end of his life, Adam Smith returned to The Theory of Moral Sentiments, his first book and in his estimation, if not history’s, his best. He had recently finished extensive revisions to The Wealth of Nations, and, as …

If you have spent any significant amount of time in some kind of creative endeavor you have probably also spent a lot of time being bored. Your day tends to be unstructured and open, leaving room to do nothing that …

When Amy Chua published an article in the Wall Street Journal last January entitled “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior,” people were offended. The article—an excerpt from her memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother—makes the case for a “Chinese” style of parenting in …

In May of 2011, Oprah aired the final episode of her talk show, ending a 25-year run. now that her show is done, Winfrey is not, of course, planning to retreat into a state of respectable semi-obscurity like an ex-president. …