Apologies to those expecting a follow-up to the post on Tim Snyder’ book On Tyranny.  That post is in the works, but has proven to be more complicated than expected.  (As a teaser, Mr. Snyder has predicted a coup in the U.S. within the next year).

While researching the possibility of a coup d’etat in the U.S., we came across a site called Quora.  Quora is a question and answer site where questions are “asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of users”.  We have not researched this site enough to rate it, however, a brief perusal suggests the questions to be interesting and the answers to be well thought out and thorough–sometimes.

You will have to register through a real account like Google or Facebook.  During the registration process, you can focus the article categories as a filter for your personalized topic “menu”.  Available topics like politics, health, technology, music, etc.—just as you might expect—are included.  These topics become immediately available to you when you complete the sign up process.

The site cannot be characterized as either heavy or light.  Backing into the site, so to speak, by following a link to a particularly good article (answer to a question) initially gave the impression of depth and seriousness.  However, further exploration for only a short time began to feel pointless. The questions posted vary dramatically.  For instance, there are questions which roughly might be characterized as trivia (“Could a current medical doctor have saved Presidents Lincoln and McKinley with our current medical knowledge?”).  Some are personal (“When is the loneliest moment of your life?”).  Some are political (“Why aren’t jobs coming back to the USA?”, “Have there ever been any countries that have tried to overthrow the US Government?” and “Is a coup d’etat underway in the USA?”). The profundity of the answers are largely determined by the questions. (Incidentally, the articles on the possibility of U.S. coup d’etat are quite interesting.)

Quora will probably never be one of your go-to sites for research.  But you might find it an interesting ancillary source of information.