Forced to Spend the Afternoon at the Public Pool This is not satire. This actually happened. A Swiss newspaper recently reported on citizens...

Vendor Locked-In Organizations talk a lot about vendor lock-in. A government becomes dependent on Microsoft. A company builds its entire inf...

The American Presidency as Content: Governing in the Age of Stimulation Something is seriously wrong with the American presidency. Not just ...

TikTok Planet Something enormous is happening to human beings. Not politically. Not economically. Anthropologically. The species itself i...

Scrolling Without a Phone I recently went to a shopping center with my daughter and saw something so strange that I immediately thought: t...

The Dialectic of Attention Hegel believed history moved through contradictions in consciousness. Marx believed history moved through contr...

The Loop The philosopher Werner Erhard once used the word “distinction” in an interesting way. Not as a synonym for intelligence or clever t...

Questions and Answers I was listening to Werner Erhard speak the other day. Or rather, half listening. That always happens to me with certai...

The Dialectic of Veganism I bought a vegan protein powder recently. Not because I suddenly became vegan. I simply wanted to try it. The pa...

Social Work as an Art I was reading about Bismarck recently and came across a line that stayed with me. Politics, he said, is less a scien...

What Is Freedom For? For centuries, Western civilization fought to liberate the individual. From kings. From churches. From rigid morality. ...

Why Continue? For decades, modern Western society operated on a powerful assumption: human beings are unhappy because they are constrained. ...

This Is It A woman in a book from the 1970s describes the strange exhaustion of her generation. She had done everything. Psychoanalysis. Med...

The Softer Weapon People usually imagine control as something obvious. Police. Censorship. Threats. Prisons. Visible force. But most huma...

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...