I was a young lad of thirteen when the first Transformers film directed by Michael Bay premiered in theaters. I do not recall much about it other than Megan Fox working on Shia Labeouf’s car, but apparently, this sultry façade was hiding a darker secret: the film was actually government-supported propaganda produced with extensive involvement from the military. This is just one of the many surprising and sometimes shocking things I learned from Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R.

Shakespeare’s Rome: Republic and Empire
by Paul Cantor
1976; University of Chicago Press, 2017, 228 pp.

The new kid on the economics block is something called modern monetary theory. The name is new, but the “theory” is not.

Perhaps more than anything else, the rationale given for the necessity of the state—and the necessity of supporting the regime at any given time—is that it “keeps us safe.” This permeates thinking about government institutions at all levels, from “thin blue line” sloganeering at the local level, all the way up to jingoism surrounding the Pentagon.

Julie Ponesse, a philosophy professor specializing in ethics who until recently taught at the University of Western Ontario in Canada, has a moving video in which she protests the requirement at her university that she get a covid-19 vaccination in order to continue teaching. She points out that it is her absolute right to decide what substances are injected into her body, and that this should settle the question of whether the requirement is legitimate.