Americanism
The subtitle of James Pethokoukis’s recent book The Conservative Futurist is ‘How to create the sci-fi world we were promised’. Like Peter Thiel’s famous complaint that ‘we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters’, the phrase captures a sense of betrayal. Today’s techno-optimism is infused with nostalgia for the retro future.
Theodore Roszak, who coined the term counterculture in his 1969 book The Making of a Counterculture, later defined its unifying characteristic as ‘the rebellion against certain essential elements of industrial society: the priesthood of technical expertise, the world view of mainstream science and the social dominance of the corporate community’.
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journals.uchicago.eduWhen men feel their masculinity is threatened, they are 24 percentage-points more likely to want to buy an SUV. They are also willing to pay $7,320 more than non-threatened men for the same vehicle.
Donations to the NRA increase 30% the year after a school shooting occurs in a county.
This idea of progress acknowledges that as soon as we have something, however well it meets our original desires, we see its flaws. ‘Form follows failure’, in the words of civil engineering professor Henry Petroski. Dissatisfaction drives progress. ‘Since nothing is perfect’, writes Petroski, ‘and, indeed, since even our ideas of perfection are not... See more
The world of tomorrow - Works in Progress
To win one of these coveted positions, then, you need to do everything exactly right from your freshman year of high school onward: get good grades, garner strong recommendations, work in the right labs, publish papers in prestigious places, never make anybody mad, and never take a detour or a break. (I occasionally get emails from high schoolers b... See more