Sublime

version that doesn’t assume that our opponents are intellectually or morally bankrupt.

I've reluctantly come around to the position of the economist Bryan Caplan, who recommends an amicable divorce. Caplan fulfilled his lifelong dream of living in a beautiful bubble around his 40th birthday. He is now surrounded by people he respects and admires. He never hears a commercial. He forgets about the existence of professional sports for m

I figured Professor Haidt would speak about moral psychology, the theme of his book. But instead, on the day of the talk, Haidt discussed the purpose of a university. He urged the audience to consider whether the aim of higher education is to protect students or to equip them with the ability to seek truth, and he was clearly in favor of the latter

Americans are now meritocrats by birth. They know this and, because it violates their fundamental beliefs, they go to a lot of trouble not to know it.

Perhaps most important was the fact that the factions were so deeply divided that in many cases no one knew anyone who disagreed with them and friendships between those who were political opponents were hard to find.

Technology companies drove the survivors into a mindset of engineered efficiency—the belief that data tells you everything of value. “Just like the tech companies, journalism has come to fetishize data. And this data has come to corrupt journalism,” Franklin Foer writes in World Without Mind. “Once journalists come to know what works, which stories