9 articles rescued
What does it mean to be serious? Visakan Veerasamy explores the difference between being serious and being solemn, why seriousness is shown rather than claimed, and how true character reveals itself over years—especially during difficult times.
A philosophical meditation on what it means to live a good life. Awais Aftab explores success, ambition, knowledge, self-honesty, compassion, humility, acceptance, suffering, and curiosity—the elements worth thinking about until we die into becoming.
Holly explores how tools mediate our relationship with the world and shape us through use. What happens when AI becomes a cognitive tool that risks doing not just what we do, but the very things that give us meaning?
Drawing on Allen Grossman, Ben Lerner argues that every poem is, by definition, a failure. A poet begins with a transcendent vision but must express it in finite language. This gap between the ideal and the actual is what makes poetry frustrating—and essential.
Maria Popova explores how success can ossify our personal narrative, using Rockwell Kent's encounter with a statue from his past as a metaphor for resisting the trap of becoming our own myth.
People are less weird than they used to be. From crime rates to cult formation, from scientific breakthroughs to website design, deviance is declining across every sector of society. Adam Mastroianni asks: in becoming safer and richer, have we sacrificed the strange thinking that drives progress?
As AI makes writing effortless, we face an uncomfortable question: if we stop wrestling with words ourselves, do we lose the ability to think deeply? Michael Dean argues that writing isn't just communication—it's how we earn back our cognitive agency.
Three brilliant writers circle the same truth from different angles: Henrik Karlsson on sacrifice, Sherry Ning on values as a filter for spending, and Ian Leslie on buying happiness. Together, they reveal why what we think we want rarely matches what we actually need.
Joseph Heath explains how the brightest Marxist philosophers of the 1980s quietly became liberals—not because capitalism won, but because they stripped away Marx's theoretical baggage and found John Rawls had already built better tools for critiquing inequality.