“You are what you learn. If all you know is how to be a gang member, that’s what you’ll be, at least until you learn something else. If you go to law school, you’ll see the world as a competition. If you study engineering, you’ll start to see the world as a complicated machine that needs tweaking. A person changes at a fundamental level as he or she merges with a particular field of knowledge. If you don’t like who you are, you have the option of learning until you become someone else. There’s almost nothing you can’t learn your way out of. Life is like a jail with an unlocked, heavy door. You’re free the minute you realize the door will open if you simply lean into it.”
Scott Adams in Dilbert.com
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Create an account with the same email registered to your subscription to unlock access.
-
Viewpoint: Michael S. Teitelbaum and Jay M. Winterfeature From The New York Times: “Nearly half of all people now live in countries where women, on average, give birth to fewer than 2.1 babies...
-
Snowden’s silence on Putin
feature If Edward Snowden truly is a moral paragon, then he should announce that he can no longer stomach Vladimir Putin’s oppressive behavior.
-
The irrelevance of the United Nations
feature Once again, the United Nations has been “rendered impotent by a small group of thugs.”
-
Millions of closeted gay men
feature “What percent of American men are gay?”
-
The smug confidence of libertarians
feature Why are most libertarians white dudes?
-
Seeing racism for what it is
feature Riley Cooper’s case shows just how poorly he and most other Americans understand “what a racist is.”
-
Searching for a libertarian paradise
feature Not one of the world’s 193 sovereign states—not even a tiny one—has adopted a full-on libertarian system.
-
Viewpoint: Juliette Kayyem
feature From The Boston Globe: “It is now clear that the Tsarnaev brothers had no strategic plan but to kill in a very public fashion....