Getting Better All the Time

Brian Rea (NYT)
I wish I could gush more about Steven Pinker's book The Better Angels of our Nature.  (Here's Peter Singer's extremely enthusiastic review.) The book has a provocative thesis--that violence has declined over the course of human history.  It offers a rich variety of explanations, many with implications for how we can reduce violence even more.  Its sentences (all 50 billion of