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Examining Social Connectedness Abroad

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  Non-Western countries are known to be more collectivistic and group-oriented, especially when compared to Western countries like Great Britain and America.  Lawrence Mead, my former professor and thesis supervisor at NYU, articulated this cultural difference in his 2019 book, Burdens of Freedom: Cultural Difference and American Power: ...Western culture is individualist, while non-Western cultures tend to be conformist. Westerners take action largely to fulfill personal goals and values, if necessary, changing the world to do so. In this sense, they live their lives from the inside out. In the non-West, by contrast, most people take their cues largely from without - from their immediate associates, higher authority, or tradition. They adjust to their environment much more than they seek to change it. They live their lives largely from the outside in.  Professor Mead is easily the most valiant and intellectually honest professor that I ever had the honor of taking. He received an enor
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It's Embarrassing To Admit This...

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  It's embarrassing to admit this, but... I really only started reading about two years ago. Before that, reading was the most mundane, yawn-inducing task I could think of. It wasn't fun or energizing; it was dull and torturous.  When I was in high school, I wasn't particularly scholarly, to put it mildly. While I did well, I didn't excel. Most, though not all, of what I read was required for my various classes. Though, now that I think about it, there were various poetry books and short stories I enjoyed. Lawrence Ferlinghetti's,  A Coney Island of the Mind;  Philip Schultz's,  Failure;  and Nikolai Gogol's,  Diary of a Madman  come to mind. I also enjoyed the dystopian works of Paul Auster.  Barring these few, but notable, exceptions, I did not read. This, in turn, effected my diction, and still does to a degree. I recall one particularly embarrassing moment in a mathematics class I took freshman year. On the first day of class - which is, of course, a pri
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Comments Open to All

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Frank Filocomo So as to encourage dialectic, I have enabled commenting privileges to all, including those without Blogger or Google accounts.  So please, feel free to opine on my posts. I do not claim to have all the answers. I, like you, am just another inquisitive mind.  Ideally, comments will be thoughtful and substantive. That way, we can engage in a productive back and forth.  That said, I have always considered myself to be a free speech absolutist; censoring opposing views, or even speech I find to be utterly rebarbative, has never been my thing.  Trolls, too, will be welcome. I may later regret this... But the point of this blog, you see, is to encourage community. And community requires interaction. Therefore, it would be counterproductive for me to prohibit speech of any kind, or to put up barriers that require people to create an account in order to comment.  Now, being that this is the internet, I use the word "community" somewhat loosely. Some may call an online
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