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How the Person Became a Self

In Strange New World, Trueman uncovers and describes the underlying social and intellectual forces that explain why his grandfather would have rejected sexual reassignment without a second thought but President Biden can declare that “transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time.” Continue Reading »

Advancing in Place

We’re stuck. The signal innovations of modern times—mass water purification, electricity, automobiles, modern manufacturing processes—are behind us. This slowing of invention presents a problem. We are trapped by the imperative of ever more innovation even as innovation becomes harder . . . . Continue Reading »

Therapeutic Revolution

One of the most remarkable features of our society is its blithe dismissal of tradition. Religious practices that have long shaped our social and political life are held in contempt. Time-tested convictions that guided generations before us are not just second-guessed but mocked and denounced. It is . . . . Continue Reading »

Pixelated Souls

The great liberal thinkers who devised our constitutional order were responding to a seventeenth-century problem, most sharply diagnosed by Thomas Hobbes. The English, Hobbes said, were “seeing double”—divided, both personally and politically, by conflicting allegiances to Christ and King. . . . . Continue Reading »

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