Sublime

The work of Singer, who was born in Melbourne, Australia, and taught at Princeton for more than two decades, was attractive because it seemed to have solved the puzzle: well-being, whether of humans or sea otters, was all that mattered. But this approach provided cover for a generation to avoid more thorny questions about what constitutes a life

In a New York Times essay in November 2004, David Brooks put it well: Highly educated young people are tutored, taught, and monitored in all aspects of their lives, except the most important, which is character-building. But without character and courage, nothing else lasts.

The cold divisive logic of the RCO impoverishes us, all of us, and brings us closer to that primitive state that the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes called “the war of every man against every man.”

to create more informed, smarter-thinking societies, public messaging needs to disentangle evidence from identity.