Victor Cary

Abstract thought is essential; the issue comes when it disconnects us from a contextual reality. McGilchrist put it beautifully: abstraction can be viewed as the removal of context in place of a false certainty.

As I discussed with philosopher and cognitive scientist Andrea Hiott recently, implicit in our embodiment is also our embeddedness in our environment, how we enact our agency, and how our cognition is extended through others.

Then, last but not at all least, there’s the fiscally disastrous (and absurdly named) “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which throughout the week slowly worked its way through the constipated bowels of Congress like a toxic turd destined to be left in the center of the sidewalk of American democracy.

The world has changed, so the way that we think about what it means to become American must too. But one thing remains the same: A cohesive and inclusive American identity won’t just create itself. It must be forged. And it’s a project that we must all participate in, adapting the successes and avoiding the missteps of the past.

A heuristic can be thought of as a “simple rule” or mental shortcut that helps us to remember what’s core, to solve problems and to make judgments quickly and efficiently. Simple rules help distill more detailed content/process to a mental habit. Simple rules not only help produce better decisions, they also allow one to synchronize their activitie... See more

Our country has urgent problems and solving them requires the civic solidarity that thinking of ourselves as Americans helps to create. The historian Richard Slotkin has observed that a workable American identity must join both the descendants of the Indigenous and those who dispossessed them, the line of the enslaved and those who possessed them, ... See more

Complexity theory tells us that planning is arguably less important than understanding that plans fail all the time, to work with that knowledge, and manage the potential for change (a plan in and of itself) because life doesn’t work to pre-conceived ideals.