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Why Cooperation Beats Competition If You Design It Right

We praise competition because it slings us awake, but the quiet truth is that cooperation does the heavy lifting. It stitches days together, forges talent into reliability, and turns cleverness into outcomes you can touch. You see it most clearly where failure costs blood or bread. Think of the night shift in a busy hospital: rounds, handoffs, an attending who catches what a resident almost missed because the culture expects second looks instead of blaming first movers. The system works not by goodwill alone but by rules that force repetition and reputational memory: chart audits, morbidity and mortality conferences, and the knowledge that you will see the same colleagues tomorrow. That is how fragile human kindness hardens into durable care.

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This Is Not the World I Wanted to Leave for You: Reflections on Legacy, Loss, and the Future We Shape

I have been thinking a great deal lately about living and dying, and about the strange, stubborn human hunger to leave something meaningful behind. The faces of those I have known who have already passed return to me in quiet moments, and I find myself watching those who are, even now, nearing the end of their own stories. I also include my final braided prairie knot in that wondering. In the background of these thoughts runs a deeper worry, a shadow that lengthens each day: the growing political instability that presses in on the goodness of life and threatens the fragile hope we carry in our personal lives. I wonder, in darker hours, if all the labor, all the love, all the sacrifice we invest in this world will ever prove to be worth it. And then, as if called back from the edge of despair, I remember what my friend, mentor, and teacher, Dr. Howard Stein, told me as he lay dying at age 91.

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Critic as Censor: How the Humanities Sacrificed Art at the Altar of Theory

My beloved friend, mentor, and Columbia University Professor Howard Stein, was fond of saying, “The Enemy of the Arts is the Humanities.” That insight, and advice, has stuck with me over the past 35 years. Now, that phrase is not the glib provocation it may seem. It is a precise diagnosis of an institutional disease, a declaration of war against a century of academic drift that has created a schism between the act of creation and the act of analysis, and we’re here to discuss this with you today. The Arts, in their purest form, are the domain of creation itself, of non-verbal expression, of performance, and of the direct, visceral encounter with an aesthetic object.1 They are a primary, generative impulse. The Humanities, by contrast, have become the domain of secondary analysis, of verbal codification, of research, and, most critically, of the theory of the arts.1 The relationship is not symbiotic; it is parasitic. Over the past half‑century, many university humanities programs, eager to claim scientific gravitas yet wary of prescriptive taste, have privileged metacritical theory over direct aesthetic encounter, often at the expense of studio practice. They have replaced the artwork with the interpretation, the artist with the critic, and beauty with politics. The evidence for this enmity is overwhelming, found in the testimony of artists, the language of critics, and the desperation of shrinking university budgets.

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The Braided Prairie: Six Nebraskan Literary Voices on Land, Life, and Legacy

The American Great Plains have produced a literary tradition as vast and complex as the landscape itself. Nebraska, with its braided rivers and endless horizons, stands at the heart of this tradition, having shaped some of the nation’s most distinctive literary voices. From the rolling Sandhills to the fossil-rich badlands, from pioneer settlements to Native American territories, the state’s diverse geography has inspired equally diverse literary responses. This study examines six Nebraska authors who transformed their regional experiences into enduring art: Willa Cather, Mari Sandoz, John G. Neihardt, Loren Eiseley, Wright Morris, and Bess Streeter Aldrich. Each brought a unique perspective to bear on the Nebraska experience, from Cather’s lyrical immigrant sagas to Sandoz’s unflinching historical accounts, from Neihardt’s spiritual epics to Eiseley’s paleontological meditations, from Morris’s photographic existentialism to Aldrich’s domestic chronicles.

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‘c’: More Than Just Fast as We Unpack the Universe’s Master Constant

Let’s dive into the universe’s ultimate speed limit: the speed of light. It’s a concept so fundamental that it underpins much of modern physics, yet so mind-bogglingly fast that, as you say, human intuition struggles to truly grasp it. We call it ‘c’, and its value in a vacuum is precisely 299,792,458 meters per second. That’s not just an estimate; since 1983, the meter has been precisely defined as the distance that light travels in a vacuum in exactly 1/299,792,458 of a second. So, light’s speed isn’t just something we measure; it’s a foundational pillar of our measurement system.

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The Precarious Republic: Understanding the Fascist Threat to Modern Democracies

What if it doesn’t take years, or even months, for a democracy to collapse—but only a few short weeks? The idea that a stable republic could fall in ninety days may seem exaggerated, until you look at the historical record. Then it becomes a haunting possibility. Fascism doesn’t always arrive with fanfare or fire. Sometimes, it walks in through the front door, wearing a suit and a smile, welcomed by the very institutions it plans to dismantle.

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Unlikely Kindred Spirits: Kripke, Heaney, and Elizabeth I: A Linguistic and Philosophical Analysis

At first glance, the analytic philosophy of Saul Kripke, the dramatic poetry of Seamus Heaney, and the political statecraft of Queen Elizabeth I could not seem more disparate. What could a 20th-century logician, a Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet, and a 16th-century monarch possibly share? Yet, beneath the surface, each grappled with language, identity, and authority in redemptive ways. Each, in their own silo, understood that naming and narrative wield power – whether it’s designating a possible world in logic, naming the unnameable traumas of Irish history, or styling oneself “Virgin Queen” to command a realm. In this exploratory conversation, we’ll sink into Kripke’s revolutionary ideas about reference and necessity, examine Heaney’s dramatic explorations of history and identity, and uncover how Elizabeth I engineered her political identity through language. We’ll reveal subtle connections – the resonances in their treatment of naming, authority, and the notion of necessity – to see how each shaped their world and left a lasting impact on the future. The journey is a thoughtful occupation: part historical detective work, part philosophical reflection, as we uncover lessons and methods from this unlikely trio.

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