Why is this the worst college in America?

People love to rank things, which explains why listsicles are so popular as clickbait. All such rankings are dependent on the measures used to score them and so tend to be quite idiosyncratic. I try to avoid them in general but being in education I was intrigued by an article that claimed that Shimer College was the worst college in America. I had never heard of this college at all and so was curious as to what it was and why it earned this dubious title.
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An Atheist’s Creed

[A reader reminded me of an old post that I had written back in 2008 on my old blog site and I thought I would reprint it except for very minor editing. So here it is.]

In the course of writing many posts on science and religion and atheism, it struck me that I was tangentially making many statements about what I, as an atheist, believe. I decided to summarize those scattered thoughts into one coherent statement. Of course, I am not presuming to claim that all atheists subscribe to this statement. The creed is purely a personal one.
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Trying desperately to overlook the obvious

The Daily Show looks at the extraordinary effort by those on the right to find something, anything, other than excessive and unreasonable use of force by the police to blame for the recent deaths of black people.

Incidentally, some are arguing that the fact that despite the clear video of the Garner killing no indictments were brought suggests that having police wear body cams will not help. I disagree. The existence of the video has created much greater consensus on the appalling nature of the killing which is why the excuses proffered on behalf of the police in this case are so absurd.
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Why we are easily fooled by film doubles

In films, the star is often replaced by a double in many situations, either because the task involved is too dangerous to risk injury or the star simply cannot or will not do what the role requires. We in the audience almost never notice the switching back and forth. One might think that this is solely due to the care that the film makers take to make sure the double has the same build as the star and is made up to have the same exterior appearance in terms of clothes and hair, and by avoiding close ups of the face.
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Sometimes there is no humor to be found

The Daily Show despite its news trappings is a comedy show and has had a difficult time dealing with the recent cases of police killings of black people. They could not ignore these stories since they were so huge but at the same time, how can you get humor out of tragedy especially when the events are so recent? They managed to do so with the events in Ferguson but the failure of a grand jury to indict the New York police officer who killed the unarmed Eric Garner when he posed no threat to anyone was too much for Jon Stewart to handle and he simply threw his hands in the air and allowed himself to editorialize about tragedy and humor.
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First Look and The New Republic

First Look Media, the umbrella new media group that started The Intercept, went through a rough patch with the sudden departure of Matt Taibbi over management issues and the shelving of the magazine he was brought in to launch called The Racket. But Glenn Greenwald today has some good news about the hiring of Betsy Reed as Editor-in-Chief to replace John Cook who is going back to his former home at Gawker.
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