During a reading project I undertook to better understand the “third wave of democracy” — the remarkable and rapid rise of democracies in Latin America, Asia, Europe and Africa in the 1970s and 80s — I came to realize that this ascendency of democratic polities was not the result of some force propelling history toward its natural, final state, as some scholars have argued.
Many academic fields can be said to ‘study morality’. Of these, the philosophical sub-discipline of normative ethics studies morality in what is arguably the least alienated way. Rather than focusing on how people and societies think and talk about morality, normative ethicists try to figure out which things are, simply, morally good or bad, and why.
It’s a grey November day; rain gently pocks the surface of the tidal pools. There is not much to see in this East Sussex nature reserve – a few gulls, a little grebe, a solitary wader on the shore – but already my breathing has slowed to the rhythm of the water lapping the shingle, my shoulders have dropped and I feel imbued with a sense of calm.
At this point, it doesn’t matter how Napoleon does. Critics might love it or critics might hate it. It might crater at the box office, or it might single-handedly resuscitate the theatrical viewing experience.
Twenty-five years ago, the burgeoning science of consciousness studies was rife with promise. With cutting-edge neuroimaging tools leading to new research programmes, the neuroscientist Christof Koch was so optimistic, he bet a case of wine that we’d uncover its secrets by now.
“It turns out that I’m young, and I have a whole life of shit I can do,” she says. “Maybe because my life became so adult very young, I forgot that I was still that young. I settled in a lot of ways: I lived my life as if I were in my 70s. I realized recently that I don’t need to do that.”
For about five minutes a few months ago, people seemed to genuinely believe that our culture was entering the age of “deinfluencing.” “Step aside, influencers,” wrote CNN.
The myth of The Writer looms large in our cultural consciousness. When most readers picture an author, they imagine an astigmatic, scholarly type who wakes at the crack of dawn in a monastic, book-filled, shockingly affordable house surrounded by nature.
In your brain, neurons are arranged in networks big and small. With every action, with every thought, the networks change: neurons are included or excluded, and the connections between them strengthen or fade.
I still love software as much today as I did when Paul Allen and I started Microsoft. But—even though it has improved a lot in the decades since then—in many ways, software is still pretty dumb.
A golden age of connectivity is ending. “I deleted my Facebook years ago, spend at least three to six months off Twitter every year, and Bluesky invites are just sitting in my inbox,” a friend tells me when I ask how her relationship to social media has changed in recent times.
Wherever this story takes you—thoughts on marriage, on food, on work, on the rise and fall of the American century, on your own life and time’s passage through it—I invite you to picture Loukas first.
Travel and history can both inspire a sense of moral relativism, as they did for the Greek historian and traveller Herodotus in the 5th century BCE. What should one make of the fact that what counts as adultery, for example, differs around the world?
A few years ago, advertisements for a software service named Monday.com seemed to be suddenly everywhere online. This ubiquity didn’t come cheap. An S.E.C. filing revealed that the product’s developers had spent close to a hundred and thirty million dollars on advertising in 2020 alone, which amounted to roughly eighty per cent of the company’s annual revenue.
The Luddites arrived on the streets of San Francisco much as they did in the English factories two centuries ago: under cover of darkness and with iconic weapons in hand. In this case, traffic cones.