Brooks says that “the secret to satisfaction has nothing to do with achievement, money, or stuff.” No argument here. Here is a taste of his recent piece in The Atlantic: I write a column about human happiness for The Atlantic and teach classes on...
happiness
Saturday night court evangelical roundup
What have Trump’s evangelicals been saying since our last update? Samuel Rodriguez is upset about the prohibition on singing in California churches. You cannot permit tens of thousands to march in protest without masks and demand that 100 worshipers refrain from singing. That my...
National Endowment for Humanities Funds Courses on "Enduring Questions"
Donald Trump’s current budget proposal will eliminate government funding for the humanities. This means that local communities and American citizens will need to come up with other ways to fund programs like this: In 2016, the National Endowment for the...
The Diderot Effect
Denis Diderot About ten years ago I taught a course on the history of American consumerism. It was a fun course to teach and I read a lot of scholarship on the subject. For various reasons I never taught the […]
A Short Introduction to Virtue Ethics
Over at Big Questions Online, Mark Vernon introduces us to the concept of “virtue ethics,” an understanding of the good life centered around community and friendship and espoused most forcefully by moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre. Vernon writes: The problem is...
Do You Want to Be Happy?
All you need to do is make $60,ooo a year. Nobel laureate and founder of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman performed a TED Talk this year about how as humans our “experiencing selves” and our “remembering selves” perceive happiness differently. Basically,...