My generation was supposed to be the “short attention span” generation, at least according to many of the adults around me when I was younger. Their thinking went that since we grew up with MTV just always there in our lives, we wouldn’t be able to focus on anything for longer than four minutes or so. The rise of social media and smartphone-toting adolescents led to its own wave of ballyhooing about how 140-character tweets would lead to a newer generation of young people being…

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About six years ago, before the Supreme Court decision Obergefell vs. Hodges legalised marriage equality in all fifty states, I heard a common refrain from many of my students that went something like this. “I think I’m a conservative. I don’t like high taxes, and I believe in limited government, but you know what? The conservatives in politics are the same people who are keeping my gay friends from getting married. I can’t accept that, so when I went to vote for the first time,…

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I was thirteen years old when the Berlin Wall fell, but I have a hard time thinking of myself as a child of the Cold War. I certainly heard a lot about how evil the Soviet Union was and all that, but I was totally unaware of how things like Russia’s food problems and Ronald Reagan’s bellicose rhetoric were pushing us to the verge of a hot war when I was still in grade school. More than that, despite how iconic the cartoons and jingles…

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