The ungrateful traveller
Last week I went to Bangkok. Returning home, the question on my mind was how did such an astonishing statement become so mundane?
ReadTag: Ethics
Never Had It So Good
By the time you read this, something truly dreadful might have blighted the world. Pinker does not prophesy that this won’t happen; he simply reminds us why it should not and need not, as long as we don’t give up the notion of the emancipatory power of reason to help illuminate the way forward. If that is naive, even more naive is the belief that despair, fatalism or superstition supplies a credible alternative.
ReadHow we forgot the collective good
“UK plc” has become part of the ordinary lexicon. If anyone finds it objectionable, few say so. No one announced that from now on we should conceive of our country as a business, but gradually, imperceptibly, it became natural to do so. This is how so many cultural shifts happen. Ways of thinking mutate gradually, helped by changes in vocabulary that we accept without question.
ReadThe strange smells of success
Best new novelist of 2018? I know him…
ReadCondemned by the good life
Why philosophers make two mistakes when prescribing the good life.
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