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My hometown: A place to stand to view the world

Sixty-nine years after I moved away, I still read the West Point News, the weekly in my Nebraska hometown. Recently some items in the paper’s “75 Years Ago” column caught my attention: “February 9, 1933: The Stanton County Courthouse is without a telephone. All but one were to be removed, but it was deemed impractical so all were taken out. Monthly cost was said to be $18.50, or $222 a year.” The Depression had hit Stanton County, and a phone in a courthouse was a luxury.

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All in the cortex: "My DNA made me do it"

The medial orbitofrontal cortex has given us much to think about recently. So far as I understand, which is not very far, the medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC) helps to explain why the more expensive wine is, the better it tastes. In an era of secular Calvinism, all of human life is predetermined, predestined and biologically fated. Not “the devil made me do it,” but “my DNA made me do it”; not “I sinned” but “something in my cell structure committed my body to it.”