I was intellectually awakened at the Athenaeum. It all started when one of my professors spontaneously assigned an essay entitled “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education.” The author of the piece was speaking at the Athenaeum later that week, and my professor wanted each of us to read the essay to encourage us to attend the lecture. When one of my classmates asked who the author was, my professor could not pronounce his name. “William Der-SHOE-wits – Derez-EWE-wicks – Deer-S

Before Andrew Sullivan’s talk at the Athenaeum this evening, I had a chance to sit down with Sullivan, one of the nation’s most widely read bloggers, to discuss the current state of U.S. military affairs and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, otherwise known as ISIS. An early advocate for America’s war on terror, Sullivan has previously been described as having “ultra-hawkish views” and militantly urged the U.S. invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan in the early 2000s. He publis

“All evil starts with 15 volts.” If there was one point that the audience was supposed to remember from Dr. Phillip Zimbardo’s Athenaeum speech, it was this. With this one line, Dr. Zimbardo succinctly highlighted his explanation for why people perform evil actions while also tying together a lineage of research that spans decades and regions, and includes some of psychology’s most famous and notorious experiments. The line itself refers to a series of experiments carried out

As someone who not only opposes public funding for birth control, but also believes in axing public funding for a wide range of government programs, I was quick to pass judgment on Sandra Fluke following her speech at the Democratic National Convention. To me, her words were painfully unoriginal, re-telling the tired feminist narrative portraying conservative men as a patriarchal oppressor class trying to “control women’s bodies” in an age when contraception was more accessib