The Necessary Devil There is a tension running through civilization that never disappears. On one side stands order: limits, continuity, obe...

Apocalypse in Switzerland A man in Zurich recently discovered that his Migros supermarket sandwich weighed 14 grams less than indicated on t...

The Managed Life There is a version of life that works. It runs on time. It eats well. It doesn’t overreach. It keeps its impulses contained...

Moralized Epistemology I recently read a sentence by the German labor minister: “Nobody immigrates into our social welfare systems.” Wh...

Against Dead Morality William Blake was not simply a poet or painter. He was one of the earliest and most radical critics of moral systems t...

Running Out of Ideas There was something clean about The Devil Wears Prada. Not because of fashion. Not because of New York. But because it ...

The Devil Wears Compassion Now “First of all, my dear friend, I think we should calm down a little with the word ‘evil.’ It’s a very mediev...

The Missing Key I spent nearly an hour looking for a motorcycle key. I searched the apartment, the hallway, outside the house, every jacke...

Spiritual Bureaucracy One of the strangest transformations in Western history is the distance between the world of the Gospels and the atmos...

Superficial Diversity Modern institutions speak endlessly about diversity. Diversity of backgrounds. Diversity of identities. Diversity of e...

Psychological Gym Membership There was a time when therapy meant something had actually gone wrong. A divorce. Panic attacks. Depression. Tr...

Interrupting the Drift There’s a way people talk about Atomic Habits that never quite lands. As if it’s a philosophy of life. It isn’t. Or a...

Accidental World Power The strange thing about power is that sometimes the people who possess it do not fully understand it until somebody e...

Back to Reality For a long time, the West behaved as if history had quietly ended. Borders became psychological rather than physical. Energy...

The Refusal to Grow Up There is something strangely adolescent about modern elite culture. Not youthful in the good sense. Not adventurous...

Atlas Logging Off There is a quiet bitterness spreading through parts of modern society. Not revolutionary bitterness. Not mobs in the stree...

Germany; The Stranded Whale Is this still reality, or has it already slipped into parody? A whale strands itself on the German coast. A sick...

Interpunctuation Conflicts rarely begin where people say they begin. Ask two sides to tell the same story and you won’t get two versions of ...

What Is Truth? There’s a moment in the Gospel where Pilate asks a question that should stop the world. “What is truth?” He doesn’t wait for ...

Pulp Scripture Recently, Pete Hegseth stood at the Pentagon and delivered a prayer. He reached for the Bible. Or something that sounded like...

Running a Dialectic on Yourself There is a phase in life where everything is outward. You try things. You move. You test limits. You go plac...

When the Madman Stops Being a Strategy There is a familiar idea in politics: play the madman. Act unpredictable. Blur intention. Make the ot...

Sustainable Contribution Experience for Visitors to Germany Berlin has found a solution. Not through reform. Not through clarity. Through a...

The Quiet Men Nobody announces it. There’s no manifesto, no march, no clean language for it. It settles in like weather. You grow up inside ...

Feeling Alive at the End There is a strange thought some people have, and most won’t admit it out loud. The world ends. Everything collapses...

The Despair You Are There is a kind of despair that announces itself. It breaks routines. It disturbs sleep. It forces questions. You feel i...

Playing Golf with Pharaoh I was watching one of Rick Roderick’s lectures again. Everyone should see them. Even if you’re not into philosophy...

The Real Count of Monte Cristo We were talking about The Count of Monte Cristo in my car.  Not casually. Properly. The way you only can when...

Ketchup on Fries You can hear it if you listen for it. Not what they say. How they say it. Rick Roderick once described American politics in...

Selective Transparency In Germany, the argument arrives dressed as hygiene. Online anonymity is treated as dirt. It breeds insults, manipula...

Jesus With a Six-Pack A tabloid runs a piece asking why Jesus Christ looks so well-trained on the cross. That’s the entry point. Not theolog...

The Tomato Problem We went to a monastery yesterday evening. One of those long Easter preparations. The kind that stretches time. Fire outsi...

Why Smart People Keep Screwing Up If stupidity were the problem, the world would be easy to fix. Teach better. Select harder. Replace the fo...

April Fools, Every Day You open a newspaper website in Germany. Front page: a stranded whale. Stranded three times in three days. Live ticke...

The Hours You Have to Put In People like to talk about pedagogy. Methods. Concepts. Approaches. Clean words for a messy reality. It sounds r...

Medicine: From Probability to Practice Medicine needs clean lines. If X, then Y. Without that, it dissolves into noise. But the body doesn’t...

Cultural Critique Doesn’t Stop People like to tell themselves a story about the last sixty years. Something broke in the 1960s. Authority co...

The Case and the Wave It never begins with politics. It begins with something small, concrete, and human. A relationship fractures. A bounda...

The Easiest Thing in the World What should I do? It sounds like a small question. The kind people answer quickly, with a clean sentence that...

Philosophy of the Dangerous Kind Most philosophy behaves. It stays in its lane, speaks in the approved tone, and leaves you exactly where it...

Trumped There is a moment in certain games when the player stops reading the table and starts believing his own story. The name already carr...

The Spirits They Lost In Switzerland, a traditional liqueur called Glarner Berggeist is under pressure. Not because it changed. Not because ...

The Funny Thing with Political Philosophy The funny thing with political philosophy is that it usually begins with a high principle and ends...

Policy 2026: Waiting for the Right Story We used to think there was a line between fiction and reality. Not always clear, but at least there...

The Man Who Could Read Everything Once, there was a man who believed that the world must first become readable before it could be understoo...

The Quiet Ponzi Feeling Sometimes a headline reveals more than it intends to. In Switzerland, the idea of a future with ten million inhabita...

Don’t Do Your Own Research There was a moment during the pandemic when a strange sentence entered everyday language: Don’t do your own resea...

The Convenient Exception Modern medicine and the supplement world like to pretend they are enemies. In reality, they often use the same tric...

The Foot-Kiss Problem There is an old story from the early Middle Ages. Maybe it happened exactly this way, maybe not. History likes to impr...

Emancipation for Women, Expectations for Men Revolutions rarely move in straight lines. They move like old streetcars. A lurch forward here,...