Anyone (or anything) that caresses your naked anxieties will also be arousing those of the legion of cowards in which you have enlisted. The more people there are who fear the same things, the easier tyranny becomes.

In his novel The Schirmer Inheritance (New York: Knopf, 1953), Eric Ambler writes that “the sadness of evil men is that they can believe no truth that does not paint the world in their colours.”

Mobility is the challenge of maturity. To break free means to move in all five dimensions. It means having a waterfall to find or a mountain to climb, a day to do it, another to reflect on it. In the romantic imagery of freedom, we get to that

We believe that we can trade freedom for security. This is a fatal mistake.

too little human contact—and to too much. In the first important book about Russian prison, the novel-as-memoir Notes from a Dead House, Fyodor Dostoevsky complained of “forced communal living,” the unceasing presence of bodies not chosen for their company.

Conforming, you are easily led. Having withdrawn from the rugged borderland of the unpredictable into the cozy cove of your digital demographic, you await orders, or nudges. You have exposed your buttons, and you wait for them to be stroked and pushed. Anyone (or anything) that caresses your naked anxieties will also be arousing those of the legion

The labor has to be social, in the sense that communities make fact-finding possible and attractive for individuals. Factuality requires institutions, above all investigative reporting.

Factuality is an indispensable form of freedom.

The word Leib designates a living human body, or an animal body, or the body of an imaginary creature in a story. A Leib is a Körper, subject to physical laws, but that is not all it is. It has its own rules and so its own opportunities. A Leib can move, a Leib can feel, and a Leib has its own center, impossible to graph precisely in space, which