Our argument is that the path forward will involve a reconciliation of a commitment to the free market, and its atomization and isolation of individual wants and needs, with the insatiable human desire for some form of collective experience and endeavor.

For Lee Kuan Yew,26 the aspirational ideal was to become, as Confucius urged more than two thousand years ago, a junzi, which has been variously translated as an “exemplary person,” or “gentleman.” This was someone who is27 “loyal to his father and mother,” “faithful to his wife,” “brings up his children well,” and is a “loyal citizen of his empero

It is rather a sort of stewardship, of the temporary and conditional ownership of an asset, that allows one to preserve its value over the long term.

It is true, of course, that purportedly neutral or innocent aesthetic decisions are often means of constructing and maintaining caste hierarchies.

He compared an African mask,4 leaving its country of origin on the continent unspecified, with the Apollo Belvedere at the Vatican, concluding with characteristic assuredness that “the Apollo embodies a higher state of civilisation than the mask.”

The issue is that humans will inevitably seek out ways of finding intimacy and connection with strangers, with people they will never meet. Should we challenge the nation’s role in that process? Or allow it to step into a breach that would otherwise be filled by an ascendant consumer culture, in which identity and belonging are defined by what one

We have begun to privilege the symbolism of victory, the more theatrical elements and outward displays that constitute expression of our own moral superiority, over actual, and often less than visible, advances and improvements in standards of living and quality of life. And yet it is the zealous pursuit of those advances and outcomes that forms th

The act of rebellion that involves building something from nothing—whether it is a poem from a blank page, a painting from a canvas, or software code on a screen—by definition requires a rejection of what has come before. It involves the bracing conclusion that something new is necessary. The hubris involved in the act of creation—that determinatio

The rise of trigger warnings and other forms of acquiescence behind which the left has zealously rallied for more than a decade has backfired spectacularly, by fostering a sense of harm that often does not exist. Richard Alan Friedman, a professor5 of clinical psychiatry at Weil Cornell Medical College, said in an interview that, beginning in 2016