Philosophy
What is true? What is certain? Einstein’s answer, in effect, was that it depends on the model you’re using. The first time I visited a deepwater drilling rig, what amazed…
Our modern civilization has no coherent world view. That sentence by physicist David Bohm hit me hard. It rang true because it explains why our social and planetary crises feel…
I saw an article last week about Japan beaming solar power from space to Earth—a science-fiction fantasy treated as a practical near-term plan. Around the same time, I read a…
Over the past year, two narratives have emerged into the mainstream: the idea of an “oil glut” and “climate realism.” Both mark a sharp departure from the dominant stories of…
Every civilization follows a life cycle—birth, growth, maturity, decline. It’s a pattern recognized for thousands of years, at least since the dawn of writing, and probably much earlier, when the…
Climate activists and climate‑change deniers are unhappy in the same way. Both see the world as a machine that just needs a tune‑up or a few replacement parts to work…
Some believe artificial intelligence is humanity’s path to utopia. Others fear it will help bring about our end—through nuclear war, ecological collapse, or machines that outgrow and discard us. I…
In 1858, Charles Darwin received a letter from Alfred Russel Wallace explaining that natural selection was the driving force behind evolution. Darwin later said it struck him like “a bolt…
Luke Kemp’s new book is great political theory built on an entertaining but unreliable version of human history. Goliath’s Curse is about humanity’s fall from grace. We were once egalitarian and nonviolent,…
On a flight to California last week, I read a review of two new books on the Renaissance that made me think differently about the times we live in. In Inventing…
The Dawn of Everything is framed as a challenge to conventional myths about human history, particularly the idea that inequality and hierarchy were inevitable outcomes of social evolution. But the…
What if everything we’ve been taught about economics—about value, money, and growth—is fundamentally backwards? What if our projections for the future aren’t just optimistic, but delusional, because they ignore what…