American Idol

No, not that shit on TV. Steven Pinker, one of my intellectual idols, opines on the decline of violence.

Theme:
In the decade of Darfur and Iraq, and shortly after the century of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, the claim that violence has been diminishing may seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. Yet recent studies that seek to quantify the historical ebb and flow of violence point to exactly that conclusion.