Individualism
Story Stream
The Rise of Western Individualism March 19, 2024
Back when I was deployed in 2011, I read a fascinating passage in How the Mind Works by Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. Pinker, describing the power of familial bonds, wrote, “every political and religious movement in history has sought to under...
The Best Memoirs of 2024 (So Far) March 15, 2024
The best memoirs share individual stories that illuminate broader or universal truths. They avoid pat answers, challenging and complicating how we view our world, our relationships, and ourselves. We’re drawn to memoirs in part because reading anothe...
There’s a Therapist Under Ocean Blvd March 11, 2024
Abigail Shrier’s new book Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up opens with an epigraph quoting Lana Del Rey’s song “Born to Die.” Lana’s lyrics (sometimes love is not enough / and the road gets tough / I don’t know why) are perhaps apt as an an...
Two Christians Take On Postliberalism March 11, 2024
A mere three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, we find ourselves bizarrely wondering whether the winners of the confrontation are the possessors of an exhausted philosophy. Liberalism long sailed upon oceans made safer by a lingering, n...
Can You Change What You Crave? March 08, 2024
Marco Leyton, PhD, assures me the cocaine he purchased was legal. Plus, it wasn’t for him. Definitely not. It was for recreational cocaine users who had answered Leyton’s ad in a local newspaper to do drugs and collect 500 Canadian dollars — for scie...
An Interview with Emmeline Clein March 06, 2024
“Writing about my body is like breaking that mirror, cathartic and chaotic and unclean,” writes Emmeline Clein in Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm. In her debut essay collection, Clein braids together scientific and academic writing, original r...
