Imagine a lighthouse on a cold coast. It is not glamorous. It does not vote, it does not donate, it does not clap at rallies. Its job is boring: it blinks, night after night, so ships do not discover the rocks the hard way. Now imagine a politician points at the lighthouse and says, with a straight face, “That blinking is panic. We will break up the lighthouse because it … Read the rest
By Eric Le Roy
First, I support no ideology under this shining sun. You don’t have to be wrong for me to be right, and vice versa. All my life, I have involved myself in civil discourse with all comers. Often it has seemed modestly productive, although rare is the occasion when I’ve noticed any radical shifts of opinion. Most people, including me, walk away with our convictions … Read the rest
There are days when I feel our species is a kind of orchestra that forgot the score but still plays with great confidence. Violins screaming in different keys, trumpets improvising in panic, the conductor having a small existential crisis. And yet, we insist with straight faces that this is rational decision-making. Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein gave a polite scientific name to this chaos: noise. Personally, I think they were … Read the rest
When I was a young lad long ago in the bland, faceless, smugly prosperous America of the 1950s, I had an itch to be somewhere else. As I heard the expression put first on the TV series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, I would indulge myself regularly in a game called “Anywhere but Here.” The Germans have a beautiful word for it: Wanderlust.
But … Read the rest
Content 16+ Every morning, in the quiet of homes far removed from the centers of power, people pick up their phones, turn on their televisions, and engage in the latest battle of ideological warfare. They argue over policies that will never touch them, defend leaders who do not know their names, and demonize people they have never met. A man in Paris rages about Trump. A woman in Madrid despises … Read the rest
