Great Courses Ttc

If you’ve ever sneezed while driving your car, did you immediately think, “Cars Cause the Common Cold!”? No, of course not. A headline like that wouldn’t make any sense. And yet, some of the sources we rely on for health and medical news are not much better. Many media outlets are perfectly happy to grab us with a wacky headline or an article that reflects none of the nuance of the study on which it’s based—as long as we buy the magazine or click through to the article. And we do. We take the bait. With 50,000 scientific studies published each week in English, many media outlets don’t put in the time and effort to adequately decipher and report on even a tiny fraction of those studies. But they publish news about them, anyway.

Why are we choosing to have fewer children, even as we put more time into raising each one? Why are we so often willing to follow the herd and the opinions of strangers when making important decisions, even when those decisions are deeply personal? Why do people bother to vote in elections even when they believe their vote can't possibly influence the outcome?

Evidence of Great Britain’s legacy to the English-speaking world—indeed, to most of the Western world itself—is all around us, woven intimately into the fabric of almost every aspect of daily life. We see it in

The world has been fundamentally changed by the shock and devastation of a 21st-century pandemic. COVID-19 has claimed six million lives; we process a daily deluge of often conflicting and/or overwhelming information; and humanity has no way of knowing when this collective trauma will finally, truly end. Will our lives ever be the same again? It seems not

Have you ever made a decision that you felt confident about and then second-guessed it? And then third-, fourth-, and fifth-guessed it? Have you ever gone home after a seemingly pleasant conversation and spent the evening dissecting every word until you wondered whether the conversation was pleasant at all?

The 20th century was a breeding ground of musical exploration, innovation, and transformation unlike any other era in history. Breaking with the traditions of the past, early 20th-century composers upended the old order of concert music, igniting both passionate admiration and white-hot controversy with works such as Claude Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, whose ethereal, otherworldly sonic textures initiated musical modernism; and Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, whose jarring primitivism and the near-riot of its premiere are the stuff of musical legend.