Essays on the intellectual currents that influence how we think and work: philosophy, culture, language, and the often-unexamined ideas that structure everyday decisions.
93 essays
Going against the grain may make people feel unsafe, yet it is through this process that true psychological safety is ultimately achieved—because people feel safe to feel unsafe and to challenge the status quo.
While our own short lives may lack the eternality of the Holy Spirit we can transcend events by our choices. Choices which, religious or not, have deep and long lasting moral implications.
The hope is much, for having gotten this far is to be forewarned and thus forearmed. In that we do well to employ scepticism when listening to a human interlocutor. Because even the best of us are filling in the blanks in our memory.
Ultimately, I do not think the problem is that we are building machines so ‘smart’ that their output is indistinguishable from human compositions. The problem is that we are educating humans whose output is so illiterate, and devoid of experience, it is indistinguishable from computer generated text
This is why some people will look at a library and see a wealth of opportunity, while others will see the same space and same books and apprehend only barriers to entry or exclusion from a world in which they think they have no part to play.
Modernists may disagree, but if challenged by these dangerous revolutionaries, refer them to the below and the glorious roots of our language.
Rage if you will and burn screen time if you like—I simply accept if I want my thoughts to be personal and private then I ought not post them online.
So long as we keep our heads while all around are loosing theirs, never dwelling too long on exaggerated threats, we are in a position to muddle through.
As late as 2015 in Great Britain, Royals who married Catholics were removed from the line of succession, and Prime Ministers avoided disclosing their Catholicism in office.
I can well picture 'Hitch', cigarette languidly hanging from the corner of his mouth, hand clasped around a whisky glass, tossing the book toward the wastepaper bin, and then leaning back in his chair. Content in the knowledge he had repaid the reading in the only way fit.
The design of the CR III cipher was produced by the College of Arms and continues a tradition of heraldry that has bound individual monarchs to the institution of monarchy for over a thousand years.
Today's Russia is pursuing the same aims as in 1946: autarchy for Russia and Russian-dominated adjacent areas by a leader, under pressure from nationalistic backers, who has miscalculated the situation.
'Fantasy (in this sense) is, I think, not a lower but a higher form of Art, indeed the most nearly pure form, and so (when achieved) the most potent.'
The Queen was an ever constant in a changeable and unpredictable world. Over seven decades, she was always there for us.
Whether you have something to hide has far more to do with who is looking than what they can see.