There is a particular kind of madness that strikes otherwise rational people when they walk into a car dealership. The floors are polished. The cars gleam under lights engineered to make sheet metal look like sculpture. A salesperson appears, friendly but not too eager, and begins a conversation that will eventually arrive at the only […]
The True Cost of a New Car (It Is Not the Monthly Payment) Read More »
You probably grew up believing science works like a town hall meeting. Someone proposes an idea, everyone debates it fairly, the best evidence wins, and humanity marches forward. It is a beautiful story. It is also, according to Thomas Kuhn, almost entirely wrong. In 1962, Kuhn published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a book that
Why the Science Community Is More Like a Cult Than a Democracy Read More »
You are forty three years old. You have the house, the career, the retirement account. And yet you wake up on a Tuesday morning with the distinct feeling that none of it means anything. Welcome to the midlife crisis, that peculiar modern ailment where people who have everything suddenly feel like they have nothing. Now,
How to “Produce” Your Way Out of a Mid-Life Crisis Read More »
You have been fooled by a bad argument today. Maybe twice. You probably did not notice, which is exactly how bad arguments work. They dress up in reasonable clothes, speak in a confident voice, and walk right past the part of your brain that is supposed to be standing guard. Aristotle noticed this problem about
The Logic Trap: How to Spot a Bad Argument in Seconds Read More »
You would think the greatest mind of ancient Greece would hand the crown to physics. Or maybe mathematics. Or at least astronomy, the science that literally studies the heavens. But no. Aristotle looked at every field of inquiry available to him and decided that politics sits above them all. Not beside them. Above them. This
Why Does Aristotle Call Politics the “Master Science”? Read More »
You can buy a Karl Marx t-shirt on Amazon for $19.99. It ships in two days if you have Prime. The shirt says something like “I Hate Capitalism” or features Marx’s bearded face screen printed in red, and it arrives in a plastic mailer produced in a factory overseas, sold by a third party vendor
There is something strange happening. Billions of people wake up every morning and voluntarily do something that prisoners, dissidents, and heretics once had to be tortured into doing. They confess. They confess what they ate, how they slept, what they feel about their mothers, why their last relationship failed, what their therapist said on Tuesday.
The Confession Industrial Complex: Why We Feel Compelled to Over-Share Online Read More »
We have been told, for as long as most of us can remember, that anger is the enemy. Breathe through it. Count to ten. Let it go. Walk away. The entire self help industry runs on the quiet assumption that anger is a malfunction, a bug in the human operating system that needs patching. Meditation
The Virtue of “Right Anger”: When Aristotle Says You Should Get Mad Read More »
Most people remember Alexander the Great for conquering the known world by the age of thirty. Fewer people remember that before he conquered anything, he spent years sitting in a garden in Macedonia, listening to a middle aged philosopher talk about plants. That philosopher was Aristotle. And the lesson he taught Alexander was not about
The Most Important Lesson Aristotle Taught Alexander the Great Read More »
There is something deeply strange about knowing what a stranger had for breakfast. Not a friend, not a neighbor, but a person you have never met and almost certainly never will. Yet millions of people wake up each morning and reach for their phones to find out exactly this. They scroll through the curated lives
The Celebrity Obsession: Schopenhauer on Why We Worship Vain Fantasies Read More »