[The pandemic] is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly…

Ok. That’s kind of obvious. Really, if you are trying to describe the perfect world, it certainly should include some theory about humanity and the purpose of human existence. This has been an obsession recently, mostly because Chris Colbert and I are working hard on the final section of his…

I used to believe, like Matt Damon in The Martian, that we could “science the shit” out of our problems. I was a “Techno-Utopian,” I now realize, and I was wrong. It is a seductive world-view, this Techno-Utopianism. It is optimistic and positive. It is about solving problems and creating…

George Frederic Hegel was not known for his start-up chops. A great thinker? To be sure. Extremely handsome? Possibly. But I have no reason to think of him as an entrepreneur. Yet today’s lean start-up mantra, “build-test-learn,” is a direct descendant of the Hegelian Dialectic.

David Deutsch is an Oxford physicist and philosopher, widely regarded as a founder of quantum computing. His books, The Fabric of Reality and The Beginning of Infinity, range far beyond Physics to hypothesize that human knowledge is infinite and will ultimately enable us to explain and accomplish everything that is…

When I was eight, my family went to the NY World’s Fair in Flushing Meadow, Queens. It was 1964 and the idealized vision of the future that pervaded the fair seemed perfectly natural to many of us. Naturally, we could expect a “great big beautiful tomorrow” (as the GE “Carousel…

I’m not sure how many of you caught the podcast I did with Chris Colbert on his “Insert:Human” series. It’s here, if you are interested. That conversation was such a blast that we have decided to continue it on “Clubhouse” the new, so-called “drop in audio” platform. It’s like a…

“The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” The quote from Martin Luther King, Jr. is catchy and often cited. It is said to have been one of President Obama’s favorites. But it raises more questions than answers: Is there really an arc, moral or…

A Fable in which We are the Turkey “On current trends,” the turkey thinks during the first week of November, “things are looking pretty good. I get food and water and I am surrounded by my fellow turkeys. They seem happy too.” Sure, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were disastrous, costly, and poorly considered and the Patriot…