On the Incoherence of “Decolonizing” the Academy
The Center - “Ideological pressure and political conformity in the workplace, professional organizations, industry, and public institutional life are so pervasive that identity politics has all but ruined social tolerance, meritocracy, and the pursuit of excellence.” (9/26/2023)

A Practical Approach to Career Education for K-12 Students
The Center - “America’s K-12 schools typically provide little information to young people on potential careers. They also generally do not provide work experiences that help them understand practical pathways to jobs and careers.” (9/6/2023)

What Socrates Can Teach Us about Political Discourse
The Center - “Rather than treating the other in a Socratic manner—which is to say, as a partner in the communal quest for truth—the polemicist roundly delegitimizes the other and reduces him to an ‘adversary, an enemy, who is wrong and whose very existence constitutes a threat.'” (8/27/2023)

Checking in on “Woke Europe”
The Center - “Like the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, continental Europe would, therefore, do well to dial down the moralizing rhetoric associated with wokeness and return to the enlightened pragmatism, cultural liberalism, and scientific curiosity that gave us the modern world.” (8/25/2023)

Aliens and America’s Crisis in Meaning
The Center - “What gives? Why are people so eager to believe wild tales despite a lack of hard, clear evidence?” (8/20/2023)

The Atheist Movement Has One Job
The Center - “This is the atheist movement’s one job: to help people navigate the world and find meaning, purpose, and community in a society that has long depended on a god-belief for these ends.” (7/27/2023)

Plato and the Pursuit of Justice
The Center - “Those who do not make justice the central concern for Plato are not talking about Plato at all.” (7/11/2023)

Could AI Become Angry at Humans for Causing Environmental Destruction?
The Center - “With artificial general intelligence (AGI) likely just decades away, there is an urgent need to consider the extent of environmental harm we are causing. AGI will likely question if humans are good stewards of the planet and quickly come to the conclusion that we are not.” (7/10/2023)

Clay Routledge: Breaking Ground in Psychology, Outside of the Academy
The Center - “Regulating your own emotions is something most people are capable of doing…It doesn’t require you constantly expressing [a problem], thinking about it, [and] sharing it with everyone…There’s something about not fixating too much on your own problems and really dwelling on them but, instead, doing something.” (7/7/2023)

Why “Longtermism” Needs Anti-Aging Science to Succeed
The Center - “Assuming anti-aging science shows results, then all of those hypothetical people living way off in the distant future may include some of us. And if that is the case, then people alive today have a practical, personal reason to care how our current actions impact the future.” (7/6/2023)

Is the “Convenience Economy” Worth the Pain It Can Inflict?
The Center - “We live in a world where every conceivable product or service is instantly accessible.” (6/26/2023)

Stop Fearing the Best-Case Scenario with Artificial Intelligence
The Center - “What receives less attention but is equally consequential is the extreme scenario in which AI saves all of humanity by making us immortal. Just as we are unprepared for life-destroying AI, we are equally unprepared for our AI savior.” (6/23/2023)

Shawne Merriman: From the NFL to “Xtreme Fighting”
The Center - “One thing I’ve learned [from] being in combat sports is that it’s internationally watched everywhere, in every country.” (6/17/2023)

Heidegger and Nazism: The Philosophy of Being and the Politics of National Socialism
The Center - “I argue against the apologetics of the sycophantic defenders of Heidegger who claim that his involvement with National Socialism is wholly reducible to his political naïveté, which includes his gross overestimation of philosophy’s power to sway and influence the development of Germany’s ‘political’ history.” (6/12/2023)

Lawrence M. Krauss: The Fundamental Questions of Science
The Center - “The great thing is the universe is as amazing as it is without all of the fairytales. The universe is far more amazing than anything that has come up in any scriptural book because the imagination of nature is much greater than the imagination of human beings.” (6/7/2023)

Waller Newell: The Characteristics of Tyranny
The Center - “We will be nothing like the way we are now. It will be like a night and day transformation. And it always does require violence because, as you said, that class or race enemy that stands in the way of future bliss simply has to be gotten rid of.” (5/31/2023)

Review: “Crassus: The First Tycoon” by Peter Stothard
The Center - “Now, Peter Stothard has given us the final decades of the republic through the eyes of Crassus—Rome’s wealthiest man and former consul who famously embarked on a vainglorious and ultimately failed conquest of Parthia that culminated in his embarrassing death.” (5/26/2023)

Faisal Saeed Al Mutar: Iraq, 20 Years After the Fall of Baghdad
The Center - “There is a lot of hope. Every time I go there and meet with the new generation, I think that they definitely want for their country to be a successful one. And that’s the conversation in Iraq. Most people have now forgotten about the war.” (5/12/2023)

How Do They Still Have Jobs?
The Center - “By any normal definition of the role of a Cabinet member, Secretary Mayorkas would have either resigned voluntarily or have had his resignation requested by the President.” (5/11/2023)

How Ideological Addiction Drives Extremism and Undermines Civil Discourse
The Center - “It is made even more dangerous because unlike other addictions, which are widely accepted as harmful, ideological addiction is being constantly fueled by irresponsible members of the political class, the press, and many on social media.” (5/10/2023)

Democrats’ Endless Anti-Institutionalism
The Center - “However, it has now become clear that once in power, Democrats, with a few notable exceptions, have largely sought to remove any impediment to realizing their agenda regardless of how time-honored or important a given tradition might be.” (5/4/2023)

Excerpt: “Heal Your Daughter”
The Center - “As one example, some time in 2018 and 2019, many of the young people in my practice suddenly started reporting gender dysphoria and declaring themselves trans. Charismatic social media stars were effectively saying: ‘If you don’t fit in, if you don’t like your body, then you’re trans. Everything will get better after you transition.'” (4/30/2023)

Review: “Uncommon Wrath” by Josiah Osgood
The Center - “[Josiah] Osgood’s book is a welcome and exciting read about the rivalry between Caesar and Cato; Cato, in the process, finally receives some much-deserved due in the story of the republic’s final decades.” (4/29/2023)

Death Is Not Inevitable: Sitting Down with Zoltan Istvan
The Center - “I’d be very surprised if a super intelligent AI a thousand years from now cannot recreate everything. Also, like so many other people, including Elon, I believe there’s probably a 50% chance we’re in a simulation. So, that would defeat the idea of death as well.” (4/28/2023)

Gen Z and a New Relationship to Work
The Center - “In the long term, it is likely that the workplace will diversify and, in turn, settle into four or five different buckets on a continuum from traditional and non-traditional, with less representation at the extremes.” (4/26/2023)

K-12 Domestic Realists Chart an Agenda to Go Beyond Education’s Culture Wars
The Center - “K-12 education’s collective illusions divert attention away from the dogged fact that most Americans, including policymakers and young people, agree on important K-12 issues.“ (4/19/2023)

Tabia Lee: What Happened at De Anza College
The Center - “There [are] ways to teach about the past that are humanistic; that are agency-focused; and that are focused on generative things rather than destructive things—rather than dismantling things and tearing things down with no plan forward of what happens after the destruction.” (4/18/2023)

Elon Musk’s Bad Take on Longevity
The Center - “Zoltan Istvan, an advocate for life extension, has observed in his longevity writings that each human mind is a unique library of information. Every time a person dies, it is like losing the Library of Alexandria.” (4/4/2023)

A Government Is More Than Capable of Addressing Multiple Crises At Once
The Center - “So, to be clear, I largely favor reducing the power of the very federal government being discussed in this piece, but that is quite different from arguing that, at its current scope and scale, it is somehow incapable of addressing multiple priorities at once.” (3/20/2023)

Would Socrates Be Anti-Woke? A Stoic Critique of Identity Politics
The Center - “For the Stoic, however, personal identity is not a fragmented life of intersecting cultural identities but rather a holistic and unified embodiment of rationality endowed by nature.” (3/19/2023)

John Cribb: What We Can Learn from Abraham Lincoln
The Center - “All of the sudden, I was on the phone with Mike Pence… ‘I just finished Old Abe last night, and I had to track you down and tell you how much I loved it, and it’s the best book about Lincoln I’ve ever read.’ And, for ten minutes, he just wanted to talk about Lincoln.” (3/18/2023)

Review: Waller Newell’s “Tyranny and Revolution: Rousseau to Heidegger”
The Center - “Beginning with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, proceeding through the luminaries of German Idealism and Romanticism—climaxing with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel—then marching beyond Hegel to Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger, Newell gives a reading of philosophy gone wrong. Horribly wrong.” (3/8/2023)

Internet Censorship: Democrats, Remember You Could Be Out of Power One Day
The Center - “The mainstream media has largely ignored the unsettling censorship tactics of the Biden administration, and Democrats—all the while—clearly cannot imagine a future Republican administration following this administration’s lead and censoring content that does not support the new administration’s political narrative or agenda.” (3/7/2023)

A Happy Retirement: A High Bar for High Achievers
The Center - “I had lost my ambition and with it my identity. Without CEO status, who was I? If I was not leading a company, what was my purpose? How would I find contentment without that all-encompassing fixation on achievement?” (3/6/2023)

Lance Morrow: “The Noise of Typewriters”
The Center - “You could read my book…as a kind of homage to the magazine.” (2/12/2023)

Review: Bowen Blair’s “A Force for Nature”
The Center - “Nancy Russell was one of those great heroines whose quest to save the Columbia Gorge in Oregon serves as an inspirational tale that embodies the best of American grit and determination.” (2/10/2023)

How Enmity Imperils Liberal Democracy
The Center - “Rather than calm debates about policy and its implications, both good and bad, we now live in a political era defined by emotion, where political discussions mutate into threats to our personal and group safety.” (2/8/2023)

Arguments Against School Choice Presume We Have Options
The Center - “In short, if public schooling on average is so woefully inadequate, how can we take seriously the argument that if a family cannot afford or otherwise access private or home schooling, public schooling is a perfectly sufficient choice?” (2/3/2023)

Free Speech: An Eternal Struggle
The Center - “While Americans and other Westerners may be living in a golden age of free speech, there are still billions of people in the world who have yet to enjoy its blessings.” (1/16/2023)

Philadelphia Schools Have Replaced Critical Thinking with “Criticality”
The Center - “Like so many school districts in a post-George Floyd America, Philadelphia’s is rushing to embrace anti-racism.” (1/11/2023)

Understanding Why Netanyahu Won
The Center - “Whatever else one may think about the unholy trinity of Prime Minister Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, and Bezalel Smotrich, they are, among other things, willing to discuss the serious internal security concerns that much of the country outside of Tel Aviv faces.” (1/11/2023)

What Is a Human?
The Center - “In fact, heterosexuality and the male-female binary can be observed across countless species. The onus of proof, therefore, is on those who claim that we are an exception.” (12/21/2022)

Work Is About Knowledge That Pays and Relationships That Are Priceless
The Center - “And both wages and relationships advance worker opportunity, the essential elements of which are what individuals know (i.e., profitable knowledge) and whom they know (i.e., priceless relationships).” (12/15/2022)

On the Inevitability of Racism
The Center - “As psychoanalysis long ago has perspicaciously demonstrated, prejudice is universal to human nature and is evolutionarily informed.” (12/5/2022)

Russia Will Pursue Desperate Strategies After It Exhausts Its Missile Supply
The Center - “Aside from the fact that history shows that rockets are far more useful at inflicting damage against military than civilian targets, their misuse may indicate an underlying strategic desperation in the Kremlin.” (12/1/2022)

The First Metaverse Nation
The Center - “What is new, in this case, is that the people of Tuvalu are hoping their future metaverse-based civilization will continue to function as a state and will be recognized internationally as a proper nation.” (12/1/2022)

No, Let’s Not: Perpetrators of Pandemic Authoritarianism Cannot Be Forgiven
The Center - “It must become embarrassing to admit one ever supported uninformed and nonconsensual participation in a medical experiment or mass house arrest and coerced isolation.” (11/7/2022)

The Complexity Paradox
The Center - “We are great at handling complexity until things get really, really complex.” (10/27/2022)

Putin’s Nuclear Threats Show that Jacinda Adern is Wrong About Nuclear Weapons
The Center - “[Prime Minister Ardern] is correct that nuclear weapons arsenals carry with them great risks of widespread destruction. However, the greatest risk lies in committing not to use them.” (10/14/2022)

Iran’s Uprising: Precursor to a New Revolution
The Center - “The unrest that flared up in response to [Mahsa Amini’s] death has been virtually unprecedented and provides the international community with perhaps the clearest reminder that the Iranian people abhor authoritarianism.” (10/12/2022)

The NatCons v. Ukraine
The Center - “At least Hazony recognizes that the democratic world should defend Ukraine. Other nationalists do not agree.” (10/6/2022)

Dr. Stanley Goldfarb: The Activist Class Takes Aim at Medicine
The Center - “It’s career ending, really…Anybody who tries to [speak out] will be shunned.” (10/5/2022)

The Second Elizabeth, a Life Appreciated
The Center - “From that distant day when I saw her ride down Poonamallee High Road in Madras, the epitome of regality and restraint, Elizabeth II did her best in balancing the demands of tradition, the weight of history, the requirements of society and culture both at home and abroad, and also attended to her family.” (9/22/2022)

No Longer Running: An Interview with Felicia Heath
The Center - “And, later in life, when I was dealing with my father coming out of prison and perhaps rekindling that relationship, I started to look at my experience slightly differently. I started sharing bits and pieces of my story with people and, to my surprise, found that some of the reactions were positive and even inspiring.” (9/13/2022)

Friendships as Pathways to Upward Income Mobility
The Center - “For example, if poor children grew up in a neighborhood where 70% of their friends were wealthy, their future income on average will increase by 20%, similar to the effect of going to a four-year college.” (8/16/2022)

Salman Rushdie: The Antithesis to Moral Cowardice
The Center - “Leading by example, Rushdie refuses to be intimidated into silence.” (8/15/2022)

When It Comes to Iran, Say “No” to Appeasement
The Center - “Without an enemy to demonize, the Islamic Republic would have to answer for its many and grave failures.” (8/3/2022)

Excerpt: Jason Pack’s “Libya and the Global Enduring Disorder”
The Center - “And hell, if General Haftar was going to win, President Trump would happily give him some tips about where to buy vacation properties in Virginia Beach. His steering of the private ‘confidence building’ chit-chat with General Haftar to real estate matters was not actually as ridiculous as it might seem.” (7/26/2022)

Peter Buxtun, the Hero of Tuskegee, 50 Years On
The Center - “In later interviews, Buxtun would shrug off the accolades he later received for his whistleblowing. ‘I don’t want to be embarrassed by an oversupply of compliments. I am who I am,’ he would tell bioethicist Carl Elliott in 2017.” (7/25/2022)

NBC New York’s Jen Maxfield: Telling the Rest of the Story
The Center - “Sometimes, I would even dream about some of the people I had interviewed on the stories. And, so through the years, I had the idea to write a book and put it all together and try to return to some of the stories.” (7/22/2022)
