Sublime

Winnicott’s crucial insight was that the parents’ agony was coming from a particular place: excessive hope. Their despair was a consequence of a cruel and counterproductive perfectionism. To help them reduce this, Winnicott developed a charming phrase: ‘the good enough parent’. No child, he insisted, needs an ideal parent. They just need an OK, pre

self-sacrificing, patient queen of the domestic realm, who assumed the moral education of her children, was born in the eighteenth century. The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau deserves considerable credit for her creation.

In 2020, Avital Balwit had won a Rhodes Scholarship and turned it down, first to run Carrick Flynn’s congressional campaign and then to give away FTX’s money. Leopold Aschenbrenner, who had entered Columbia University at the age of fifteen and graduated four years later as class valedictorian, had just declined a spot at Yale Law School to work for

In The Coddling of the American Mind, Lukianoff and Haidt chart a dramatic decrease in young people’s resilience and ability to cope with difficult ideas and hurt feelings. The authors do not belittle these struggles, but emphasize that they are a painful consequence of the acceptance of three “Great Untruths.” These are the belief that people are

Regardless of how exactly one generates theories of other people's minds, it's clear that these theories profoundly affect moral decisions. Look, for example, at the ultimatum game, a staple of experimental economics. The rules of the game are simple, if a little bit unfair: an experimenter pairs two people together, and hands one of them ten dolla