Articles

The strange persistence of guilt

In 1981, philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre opened his book “After Virtue” with a passage that is now famous. Imagine if we lost the theoretical coherence of science. Imagine if we still used scientific words like neutrino and atomic weight, but had no overall framework to explain how they fit together. That’s the state of our moral […]

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Making sense of the election night shocker

If your social circles are like mine, you spent election night swapping miserable texts. Not all, but many of my friends and family members were outraged, stunned, disgusted and devastated. This is victory for white supremacy, people wrote, for misogyny, nativism and authoritarianism. Those emotional reactions were a fitting first-night response to the greatest political […]

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The coming political realignment

Donald Trump has done something politically smart and substantively revolutionary. He is a Republican presidential candidate running against free trade and, effectively, free markets. By putting trade at the top of the conversation Trump elevates the issue on which Hillary Clinton is the most squirrelly, where her position reinforces the message that she will say […]

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