The ubiquitous off-ramps and backup plans among the current generation, and instinct to burnish the rough edges off of one’s opinions, stand in opposition to throwing oneself into an endeavor with the abandon, nearly reckless, that is required to succeed, or at least fail in a sufficiently substantial way that provokes development.

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

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.”

As Vannevar Bush observed, writing in 1949, the failure of the Nazis to develop a sufficiently effective proximity fuse, which allowed bombs to detonate just prior to hitting their targets, was a consequence of their arrogance, not their incompetence. The Germans, he wrote,32 were incredulous that “the verdammter Amerikaner” had succeeded “where th

Students now arrive at the university ignorant and cynical about our political heritage, lacking the wherewithal to be either inspired by it or seriously critical of it.”

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

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.

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

As the French author Pascal Bruckner24 has written, when we lack “the power to do anything, sensitivity becomes our main aim,” and thus “the aim is not so much to do anything, as to be judged.”