Can you feel good about feeling bad?
Take a lunch break and join us for a short conversation based on Wislawa Szymborska’s poem “In Praise of Feeling Bad About Yourself”.
At a time when many of us are physically separated, Delaware Humanities plans to host some “Distant Discussions” to bring us together. We will use videos, shorts stories, poems, and more to bridge the gap between us, when a sense of community and being united is especially important.
Use this link to read the poem.
To join the conversation, please register.
Contact us with any questions!
As the scientific age arrived, great advances in police science allowed detectives to crack complex cases. Drawing on intriguing crimes from long ago that were solved by emerging new methods, this one-hour program shows how science, technology, and professional practices evolved, helping detectives crack cases, which were once unsolvable.
The year 2020 marks the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which finally gave American women the right to vote. In this presentation, we will meet some of the determined women, both on the national level and in Delaware, who lobbied for women’s right to vote and those who fought against it.
In 2016, a federal appeals court struck down an Ohio law that provided penalties for lying during political campaigns. The reason? There is, in fact, a constitutional right to lie. Sure, you can be prosecuted for things like fraud, perjury, and libel, but those are exceptions. In general, constitutional protection for free speech does not depend on whether the speech is true. And when the topic is politics, untruthful speech is not only protected under the First Amendment, but enjoys the highest level of constitutional protection. Why? That’s what this talk is about. For twenty minutes or so, we’ll step back from the fray of partisan politics to take a look at the history and ideas behind our current system. After a brief Q and A, we’ll spend the rest of the program discussing the following questions: Have we, or have we not, reached a point in the history of our country where political lying has so disrupted our electoral system that the public good requires the establishment of legal limits comparable to those placed on perjury? If so, what should such a policy look like, and what unintended consequences might follow?
How do we decide what we believe, and what we don’t believe? Drawing on philosophical, psychological, and legal resources – and avoiding partisan politics – this talk outlines a few of the unconscious factors that influence the way humans reach conclusions and make decisions.
