The Town Square
Philosophy on the Danube River
In the aftermath of the Yugoslavian Civil War, a local philosopher uses philosophical practice to inspire personal and communal action.
All the Lonely People: The Atomized Generation
We’re not only facing a crisis of loneliness but we’re atomized. Our systems seem designed to further undermine social fabric and place.
The Locking Spine
Eating crab is a fitting tradition for an Appalachian community dealing with the intergenerational trauma connected to the opioid crisis.
America Needs to Build Strong Towns, Not More Infrastructure
The key to fixing our cities, to creating Strong Towns, is to treat them like complex, emergent systems capable of iterative change.
Can Social Technologists Solve the Atomization Problem?
To address rising atomization and alienation, we must account for radical inadequacy and experiment with more totalizing communities.
Tribes and Tribulations
Trust in an Age of Reactionaries and Revolutionaries
Rather than view recent political failings as flaws inherent to liberalism, we might be better served by focusing on the decline in trust.
Flourishing
It’s All a Bit Absurd
Amidst a pandemic, Albert Camus’ novel The Plague suggests that we can find courage, community, and hope while embracing the absurd.
How Deconstructing Anxiety Makes Transcendence Possible
With the understanding that fear is the fundamental problem in being human, we have our starting point. To pursue this quest, we must fully deconstruct anxiety, reveal its origins and mechanism, and find its resolution.
‘The School of Life’ Preaches Pessimism over Romanticism
‘The School of Life’ is on a crusade to avail us of our emotional ignorance. Philosopher Alain De Botton seeks to remedy the shortcomings of contemporary education systems and the institutions that have failed to instruct us in how to approach the big questions in life.
Haste Makes Waste
Haste becomes waste is intimately tied to the fact that many people have forgotten to inhabit their body, too eager to get somewhere else.
Happiness Precedes Success and Achievement
Our cultural institutions have the story backwards. Focus on well-being instead of achievement, and success will follow.
‘Follow Your Passion’ Is Actually Good Advice (Sort of)
Here are five recent research findings worth considering when weighing the wisdom of “follow your passion” or pursuing a calling in life.
Religious Impulses
Natural Mysticism and Its Dangerous Allure
Natural mysticism focuses on awakening us from our ego-bound ordinary life to a universal oneness. But it comes with many dangers.
Wilderness Lost
Sages and Stoics
Wanderlust Is a Vice, Not a Virtue
Critiques of wanderlust by Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Stoics have far-reaching consequences for our ability to lead meaningful lives.
Momento Mori
The Mythos of Pandemic
Without a shared mythos or communal rituals, we face not only the physical threat of coronavirus but also an epidemic of hopelessness.
Tradition and Progress
A Progressive’s Take on Ron Chernow’s ‘Grant’
Individuals don’t make history but there are the “best of us” people, like Grant, who withstand the crushing pressures of their times.
The Precariousness of Societies Without Moralizing Gods
The answer to whether complex civilizations or moralizing gods came first has significant ramifications for how we address social ills today.
Jung and Freud Feud: Is it Sex or the Collective Unconscious?
Once resembling the relationship between a devoted father and an admiring son, Freud and Jung split over the question of culture’s origins.
‘The History of White People’ and Their Mixed Legacies
Nell Irvin Painter’s book identifies some of the roots of the inequality we see today, which are based on the antiquated “science” of race theory. We can use the social construct of race to address social injustices, but what do we do with the mixed legacies of race theorists?
A Divided World Needs to Make God a Useful Idea, Again
In his newest book, God: A Human History, Reza Aslan seeks to provide an explanation for this rise of what he refers to as “the humanized God.” He proposes a more pragmatic idea of god, instead.