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Thus, questions about inequality in the modern world can be reformulated as follows.

Why did wealth and power become distributed as they now are, rather than in some other way? For instance, why aren’t Native Americans, Africans, and Aboriginal Australians the ones who decimated, subjugated, or exterminated Europeans and Asians?

A move toward independent life did not simply emerge from a clamshell: It was born of generations of dissatisfaction with the inequities of religious, conservative, social practice…The impulse toward liberation isn’t inoculated against by strict conservative backgrounds; it’s often inculcated by them.

It turned out that the introverts who were especially good at acting like extroverts tended to score high for a trait that psychologists call “self-monitoring.” Self-monitors are highly skilled at modifying their behavior to the social demands of a situation.”

We found out later that in January 2015, state officials, while telling Flint residents that their water was safe to drink, were arranging for water coolers to be delivered to the Flint State Office Building so state employees wouldn’t have to drink from the tap.

What exactly was a witch?…A witch is one who can do or seems to do strange things, beyond the known power of art and ordinary nature, by virtue of a confederacy with evil spirits.

When privileged children work incredibly hard in school, it’s easy to forget the ways in which private music lessons, expensive tutors, and a privileged community also enable their achievements…American meritocracy is built on exclusion.

In fixating almost exclusively on what poor people and their communities lack–good jobs, a strong safety net, role models–we have neglected the critical ways that exploitation contributes to the persistence of poverty. We have overlooked a fact that landlords never have: there is a lot of money to be made off the poor…Exploitation thrives when it comes to the essentials, like housing and food.

In contrast to the standard conception of the media as cantankerous, obstinate, and ubiquitous in their search for truth and their independence of authority, we have spelled out and applied a propaganda model that indeed sees the media as serving a ‘societal purpose,’ but not that of enabling the public to assert meaningful control over the political process by providing them with the information needed for the intelligent discharge of political responsibilities.

Keys’ primary argument to his military patrons was that solving the hunger problem effectively would be good for democracy. A famished Europe would be fertile ground for communist and fascist ideologues. Knowledge about hunger could be a weapon used to fend off the Red Menace.

Obama administration officials touted statistics that distorted what was really happening on the ground. The Bush administration had done the same, but Obama staffers in the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department took it to a new level, hyping figures that were misleading, spurious or downright false.

Some defined homeowners’ rights as an extension of their constitutional right to freedom of assembly. They had a right to choose their associates. That right would be infringed if their neighborhoods were racially mixed.

For they remind us that there must have been countless social customs of signs and symbols once alive in the Middle Ages, entire sophisticated gestural dialects that have since completely vanished.

No single mechanism explains all the mass extinctions in the record, and yet changes in ocean chemistry seem to be a pretty good indicator. Ocean acidification played a role in at least two of the Big Five extinctions (the end-Permian and the end-Triassic) and quite possibly it was a major factor in a third (the end-Cretaceous).

There are really two Americas, one for the grifter class, and one for everybody else. In everybody-else land, the world of small businesses and wage-earning employees, the government is something to be avoided…In the grifter world, however, government is a slavish lapdog…The grifter class depends on these two positions getting confused.