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Unpatriotic Corporations
Years ago, one-time `presidential candidate Mitt Romney was criticized for saying corporations are people. The guy who beat him, Obama, called corporation that used inversion unpatriotic. One might argue that criticizing corporations for being unpatriotic is to accept that they are people. In the United States, corporations are legally persons—and the Supreme Court is devoted…
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Hope Is the Thing with Feathers, and with Fangs: The Alchemy of Unrequited Love and the Story Behind Emily Dickinson’s Most Famous Poem
This essay is adapted from the nineteenth chapter of my book Figuring. In the first autumn of her thirties, Emily Dickinson wrote to her confidante and eventual editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson: I had a terror — since September — I could tell to none, and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying…
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How to Survive Hopelessness: The Remarkable Story of a Shipwrecked Family
“You can expect good and bad luck, but good or bad judgment is your prerogative.” Dougal Robertson (January 29, 1924–September 22, 1991) was still a teenager, the youngest of a Scottish music teacher’s eight children, when he joined the British Merchant Navy. After a Japanese attack on a steamship during WWII killed his wife and…
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James Baldwin on How to Live Through Your Darkest Hour and Life as a Moral Obligation to the Universe
“I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being. I am aware that we do not save each other very often. But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time.” “Yesterday has already vanished among the shadows of the past; to-morrow has not…
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