The Death of Cool
“More and more young, intellectually inclined, and politically heterodox thinkers are showing disillusionment with the contemporary faith in technocracy and personal autonomy. They see this combination as having contributed to the fundamentally alienating character of modern Western life. The chipper, distinctly liberal optimism of rationalist cult... See more
Zach Lamb • The Noetic Future of Culture and Brands
Moments like these make me acutely aware of how far life has veered off the path that we imagined. And while life is always full of unexpected twists, the last decade feels like an unrelenting crescendo of crises. Climate disasters, political instability, wars, mass shootings, genocide—wave after relentless wave. Trump’s election in 2016 was a tipp... See more
How Do You Plan for a Future That Might Not Exist?
Then came the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), the rise of populism, and the pandemic. These were three hits that a healthy democracy could have withstood but that caused ours to buckle and give way, revealing pillars and beams that had been decaying for decades. Pollsters are struggling to catch up with the depth of Americans’ dismay across the poli
... See moreNeil Howe • The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End
In their growing tolerance, they no longer bother trying to change other people’s opinions—so long as they don’t have to interact with them. Americans now complain, instead, about something very different: the growing dysfunction of a society composed of contradictory and incompatible pieces. They worry about how, in the absence of any binding civi
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