Problem: Charles Taze Russell was born to Scottish-Irish parents, immigrant Joseph Lytel Russell  (d. December 17, 1897) and Ann Eliza Birney (d. January 25, 1861), on February 16, 1852 in Allegheny, Pennsylvania. Russell was the second of five children, of whom two survived into adulthood. His mother died when he was 9 years old. The Russells lived for a time in Philadelphia before moving to Pittsburgh, where they became members of the Presbyterian Church.

With the formation of the Watch Tower Society, Russell intensified his ministry. His Bible study group had grown to hundreds of local members, with followers throughout New England, the Virginias, Ohio, and elsewhere. They annually re-elected him "Pastor", and commonly referred to him as "Pastor Russell". Congregations that eventually formed in other nations also followed this tradition.  In 1881, Russell published his first work to gain wide distribution: Food for Thinking Christians. The 162-page "pamphlet" was published using donated funds amounting to approximately $40,000 (current value $1,014,345). It had a circulation of nearly 1.5 million copies over a period of four months distributed throughout the United States, Canada and Great Britain by various channels. During the same year he published Tabernacle and its Teachings which was quickly expanded and reissued as Tabernacle Shadows of the "Better Sacrifices", outlining his interpretation of the various animal sacrifices and tabernacle ceremonies instituted by Moses. Russell claimed that the distribution of these works and other tracts by the Watch Tower Society during 1881 exceeded by eight times that of the American Tract Society for the year 1880.  In 1903, newspapers began publishing his written sermons. These newspaper sermons were syndicated worldwide in as many as 4,000 newspapers, eventually reaching an estimated readership of some 15 million in the United States and Canada.  In 1910 the secular journal Overland Monthly calculated that by 1909, Russell's writings had become the most widely distributed, privately produced English-language works in the United States. It said that the entire corpus of his works were the third most circulated on earth, after the Bible and the Chinese Almanac. In 1912 The Continent, a Presbyterian journal, stated that in North America Russell's writings had achieved a greater circulation "than the combined circulation of the writings of all the priests and preachers in North America."  Russell also had many critics, and he was frequently described as a heretic in this period.

What was the content of the book?

Answer with quotes: 


Problem: John Owen Brennan (born September 22, 1955) was the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from March 2013 to January 2017. He served as chief counterterrorism advisor to U.S. President Barack Obama; his title was Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, and Assistant to the President. His responsibilities included overseeing plans to protect the country from terrorism and respond to natural disasters, and he met with the President daily. Previously, he advised President Obama on foreign policy and intelligence issues during the 2008 presidential campaign and transition.

In April 2012, Brennan was the first Obama administration official to publicly acknowledge CIA drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. In his speech he explained the legality, morality, and effectiveness of the program. The ACLU and other organizations disagreed. In 2011-2012, he also helped reorganize the process, under the aegis of the Disposition Matrix database, by which people outside of war zones were put on the list of drone targets. According to an Associated Press story, the reorganization helped "concentrate power" over the process inside the White House administration.  In June 2011, Brennan claimed that US counter-terrorism operations had not resulted in "a single collateral death" in the past year because of the "precision of the capabilities that we've been able to develop." Nine months later, Brennan claimed he had said "we had no information" about any civilian, noncombatant deaths during the timeframe in question. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism disagreed with Brennan, citing their own research that initially led them to believe that 45 to 56 civilians, including six children, had been killed by ten US drone strikes during the year-long period in question. Additional research led the Bureau to raise their estimate to 76 deaths, including eight children and two women. According to the Bureau, Brennan's claims "do not appear to bear scrutiny." The Atlantic has been harsher in its criticism, saying that "Brennan has been willing to lie about those drone strikes to hide ugly realities."  According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Brennan's comments about collateral death are perhaps explained by a counting method that treats all military-aged males in a strike zone as combatants unless there is explicit information to prove them innocent.

Was it proven that he lied?

Answer with quotes: Brennan has been willing to lie about those drone strikes to hide ugly realities."


Problem: Bruno Latour (French: [latuR]; born 22 June 1947) is a French philosopher, anthropologist and sociologist. He is especially known for his work in the field of science and technology studies (STS). After teaching at the Ecole des Mines de Paris (Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation) from 1982 to 2006, he became Professor at Sciences Po Paris (2006-2017), where he was the scientific director of the Sciences Po Medialab. He retired from several university activities in 2017.

After his early career efforts, Latour shifted his research interests to focus on laboratory scientists. Latour rose in importance following the 1979 publication of Laboratory Life: the Social Construction of Scientific Facts with co-author Steve Woolgar. In the book, the authors undertake an ethnographic study of a neuroendocrinology research laboratory at the Salk Institute. This early work argued that naive descriptions of the scientific method, in which theories stand or fall on the outcome of a single experiment, are inconsistent with actual laboratory practice.  In the laboratory, Latour and Woolgar observed that a typical experiment produces only inconclusive data that is attributed to failure of the apparatus or experimental method, and that a large part of scientific training involves learning how to make the subjective decision of what data to keep and what data to throw out. Latour and Woolgar argued that, for untrained observers, the entire process resembles not an unbiased search for truth and accuracy but a mechanism for ignoring data that contradicts scientific orthodoxy.  Latour and Woolgar produced a highly heterodox and controversial picture of the sciences. Drawing on the work of Gaston Bachelard, they advance the notion that the objects of scientific study are socially constructed within the laboratory--that they cannot be attributed with an existence outside of the instruments that measure them and the minds that interpret them. They view scientific activity as a system of beliefs, oral traditions and culturally specific practices-- in short, science is reconstructed not as a procedure or as a set of principles but as a culture. Latour's 1987 book Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society is one of the key texts of the sociology of scientific knowledge in which he famously wrote his Second Principle as follows: "Scientist and engineers speak in the name of new allies that they have shaped and enrolled; representatives among other representatives, they add these unexpected resources to tip the balance of force in their favor."  Some of Latour's position and findings in this era provoked vehement rebuttals. Gross and Leavitt argue that Latour's position becomes absurd when applied to non-scientific contexts: e.g., if a group of coworkers in a windowless room were debating whether or not it were raining outside and went outdoors to discover raindrops in the air and puddles on the soil, Latour's hypothesis would assert that the rain was socially constructed. Similarly, philosopher John Searle argues that Latour's "extreme social constructivist" position is seriously flawed on several points, and furthermore has inadvertently "comical results."

Did he work in the laboratory?

Answer with quotes:
Latour rose in importance following the 1979 publication of Laboratory Life: the Social Construction of Scientific Facts with co-author Steve Woolgar.