In 1268 the Republic of Venice settled on a way to choose its doge that still looks like a puzzle invented to torment students. The Great Council drew thirty of its members by lot. The thirty were cut to nine […]
In 1976 a double-hulled canoe named Hōkūleʻa sailed from Maui to Tahiti, about 2,500 miles, without a compass, a chart, or a sextant. Its navigator was Mau Piailug, from Satawal, a coral island in Micronesia about a mile long with […]
There is a painting in the Prado's collection, hung for years in Spain's Congress of Deputies, that shows three men about to die. Antonio Gisbert painted it in 1860. Juan de Padilla stands at the center, calm, his hand on […]
Culture is what people do when no one is telling them what to do. Law can be written in an afternoon and repealed in another. Culture takes generations to grow and generations to lose, and it decides, long before any […]
Thomas Paine opened Common Sense with that distinction in January of 1776, months before any congress had declared anything, and the distinction is the whole argument this piece is built on. Society — the actual fabric of people cooperating, trading, […]
Almost no profession scores its practitioners the way tennis scores its own. A surgeon's skill is filtered through hospital politics, referral networks, and malpractice exposure before it becomes a reputation. A software engineer's output is filtered through a manager's judgment, […]
Social Liberty