The Boffins' Portal Team 
The contemporary global society is rife with feelings of contempt for liberal democracy due to a persistent rise in societal, economic, and political inequalities. As a result, countries from all corners of the world are increasingly abandoning this democratic approach to governance for alternative political movements, such as nationalism, populism, and more worryingly, illiberal democracy. …
What are your options as a person under an absolute monarchy where you hardly have a voice in how you get governed? Pretty much nothing. That describes the bleak world before the winds of liberalism came blowing. For centuries, Europe was ruled by monarchs (or sometimes aristocrats) who based their legitimacy on the so-called divine …
Parliamentary democracy is arguably one of the most dominant forms of governance across the globe, with 51 out of 195 sovereign nations adopting this administrative system. In this kind of democracy, the legislature and executive branches of government are intertwined. The executive is held accountable to, and derives its permissibility from, the legislature. What’s more, …
If the pursuit of pleasure is the central motivation for your life then, well, you are a hedonist. This is not just plain pleasure when you are done with whatever you call work but you are the type that seeks pleasure and avoids pain as much as possible even when you are at work. This …
When you think of a concept such as bird, what example from this category immediately comes to mind? Is it a finch, a parrot, or perhaps a chicken? Even though all the three share several features that make them belong to the category called birds, people tend to think of one of them as the …
Would you boil a baby in order to save a million people? Some people would object most likely with shock. Boiling a baby would be morally unacceptable under any circumstances for them. Yet others would justify it for the sake of saving a million lives. This dicey situation introduces us to a concept in ethics …
In her TED Talk titled “How Russia Hacked the US Election”, Laura Galante, a cyber-analyst, stipulates that the rise in digital technology has made the human brain the most exploitable data processing unit in the universe. She argues that digital media exposes people to an unfiltered flow of data that becomes more familiar with time, …
In the words of Phineas T. Barnum, “There is a sucker born every minute”. Barnum was a well-known nineteenth-century American showman hailed for his one-of-a-kind exhibits. People paid a lot of money to witness Barnum’s intriguing spectacles, such as the Cardiff Giant and George Washington’s 161-year-old nanny. While Barnum’s showcases were hoaxes, people would buy …
The use of mythical allusions does not just enrich language but also deepens the meaning of things. Some allusions have been used over and over until they have part and parcel of our day-to-day language. Most of the time we slide them here and there in our writing or speech without knowing we are using …
Have you read a sentence in which the use of a particular word or phrase came across as a proverbial stone cast to kill two birds? Then you have definitely dealt with Syllepsis. These amazing rhetorical devices may make you read the statement twice to confirm whether they make grammatical sense. Surprisingly, the statements pass …