Support First Things by turning your adblocker off or by making a  donation. Thanks!

Catastrophism and Control

A wise man knows that he must put things into perspective, but a still wiser man knows what perspective to put them into. A doctor who tells the widow of a patient who has just died that, after all, her husband’s was only one of 2,800,000 deaths a year in the United States alone (56,000,000 . . . . Continue Reading »

Dying of Despair

On November 4, 2014, ­­sixteen-year-old Cameron Lee, a popular, athletic, straight-A student at Henry M. Gunn High School in Palo Alto, California, leapt in front of a commuter train. His suicide note provided no clear reason for his act; there were no apparent signs of mental illness, and he was . . . . Continue Reading »

Whistling Past the Grave

When we talk about the key shifts of the twentieth century—those involving politics, trade, consumption, art—we leave out what is surely the most astonishing physical change in all of human history, one that has happened mostly during the last century: the doubling of the human life span . . . . Continue Reading »

Filter Tag Articles