Germany as Seismograph Germany has often been a laboratory of the future. Not because it invents the tendencies first, but because it amplif...

School Social Work: How the Map Eats the Territory There is a quiet misunderstanding at the heart of school social work. It doesn’t announce...

The Customer Model of Citizenship A man punches another driver’s windshield because someone honked. The police follow him. The officer appro...

Henry VIII: A Case Study in Executive Overreach If you strip away the fur collars and oil paintings, reads less like a monarch and more li...

The Polite Nudge Let’s stop pretending. Media has always shaped reality. Governments frame wars. Corporations frame products. News frames ...

When Ideology Feels Like Common Sense I saw an image on the University of Bern’s social media feed and felt that familiar flicker of recogni...

What Does Time Do? My twelve year old daughter and I went back to the village where I was born. It is not even a town. Teufen is just a sm...

When the Mind Runs Hot There was a time when distrust had a direction. You distrusted a party. A newspaper. A politician. A bank. The anger ...

Forward Without Amnesia An African philosopher in Germany wants to write about Nietzsche. He is told by the university, that perhaps he shou...

The Infection Without a Virus In 2019, teenagers in Germany began developing Tourette-like symptoms almost overnight. They shouted obsceniti...

We Have No Future For most of human history, the future was repetition. You were born where your father was born. You did what he did. The...

When the Depth Scares Them Start a real conversation and watch the temperature drop. At first it moves easily. Music. Travel. Work. Opinions...

The Calm Warrior A few days ago, my twelve year old daughter asked me something serious. Not about school, not about friends, not about home...

The Last Horizon Yesterday my daughter and I drove to France. Just across the Swiss border. Nothing dramatic. A few hours there, a few hours...

Carry Your Center This is about parenting. Not the visible parts. Not school choices, hobbies, or rules about screen time. This is about the...

I Fight for My Feelings There was a young woman standing in the street, holding a sign that read: I fight fascism. She was not shouting. She...

Epstein Files: Carry No Illusions For a period of my life, I worked as private secretary to a very powerful man. A billionaire. Well known. ...

Crans Montana: When the Government Begins to Behave Like a Cartel On January 1, 2026, shortly after one in the morning, a fire broke out in ...

Stoicism Never Took the Red Pill A bald man in dark glasses named Andrew Tate points at the camera. A recent article in the Süddeutsche Zei...

A Smackdown With Pure Reason  I tried to know the world once. Really know it. Not the postcard version. Not the goddamn brochure. I leaned o...

The Political Nightmare There was a time when politics at least pretended to justify itself. Facts were bent, interests disguised, motives c...

When Intelligence Has Nowhere to Go In the Spanish movie Sleep Tight (2011), the setting is an apartment building in Barcelona. A place held...

Importing Meaning In the 1960s, the Western left encountered an outcome its own theory had not prepared it for. Marx had assumed that indust...

Honmono: Authenticity as Residue  In Japanese, honmono (本物) means “the real thing.” At its simplest, it distinguishes what is genuine from w...

Where the Line Begins to Move Free speech in Europe is under pressure. Not abolished, not extinguished, but increasingly managed. In one sen...

The Swiss Village That Did Not Argue There is a village that looks, at first glance, exactly the way a Swiss village should look. The houses...

Reality Is Nazi There is a peculiar kind of person one encounters more and more often now. They enter the room composed, articulate, certain...

A Middle Path for Navigating Modern Complexity with Wisdom and Grace People in the West keep returning to Taoism and Buddhism the way city d...

The Epstein Distraction The most corrosive effect of the Epstein obsession is not what it reveals, but what it immobilizes. The story functi...

The Gym, Late Afternoon The gym is bright in the wrong way. Fluorescent light. Mirrors everywhere. Bodies doing what bodies have always done...

Suicide of a Civilisation Mental health is not the human default. That uncomfortable fact was stated with icy clarity by Peter Wessel Zapffe...

Post-Legitimacy Governance A cold winter in Europe. Snow in places where warmer, milder seasons were promised. Ice on the roads. On social m...

Karen Is Not Just a Woman: This Should Not Be Happening to Me For most of my adult life, the system has worked quietly in my favor. Borders....

Ontological Fragmentation and the Death of Mass Culture What is happening around us is often described as polarization. That word is too sma...

The Fantasy of the Meta-Position Dieting is where a deeper political and philosophical lie becomes visible in everyday life. On the surface,...

2021: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in Switzerland: “I Stand Here With You” What follows is my report as it appeared in a small Swiss newspaper. On ...

Radioactive Liability: Why the West Did Not Go After China The Western response to the origins of COVID-19 only looks puzzling if you take o...

Social Work Without Being Social There is a particular kind of unease that arises when form and content drift too far apart. I felt it recen...

To My Daughter on Her Twelfth Birthday There is an old philosophy called Stoicism. It began more than two thousand years ago, with people wh...

NPCs Don’t Suffer Late at night, dark trailers were placed across a highway in Germany. No lights. No warning. A truck driver barely stopped...

  Was Hitler Left or Right? The claim that Hitler was “left-wing” does not come from historical study. It comes from present-day political i...

State of the European Union The European Union reaffirmed its commitment to unity. Several member states expressed reservations. The measure...

The West in Stereo If you put today’s America and today’s Europe next to each other, you don’t see harmony or balance. You see a structural ...

Donald Trump and the Price of Volatility Donald Trump was in Switzerland last week, speaking in Davos at the World Economic Forum. By coinci...

The End of Corrective Reality The conversation broke down over a single word. I was speaking with a fellow school social worker, a woman wit...

Why Some Men Want to Become Women  Something historically strange is happening in the West. Large numbers of men in Western societies are op...

Asleep at the Wheel None of this was a surprise. The demographic collapse unfolding across Europe, East Asia, and much of the developed worl...

Sanctioning Neutrality I didn’t follow Jacques Baud closely. I don’t live inside the daily churn of war commentary, expert panels, or Telegr...

The Death of Arthur Arthur did not die at Camlann. He died later, quietly, under layers of good intentions. From a distance, the Arthurian l...

Identity Without Skin We like to think of ourselves as free. Especially in modern societies. Free to choose, free to define ourselves, free ...