What we lose when airlines won’t let us look out the windows

by N. Gabriel Martin The centrally-controlled dimming windows on newer airliners are an attack on human dignity, an affront to liberty, an insult to the sublimity of flight, and a curse against the beauty of our planet. Now let me tell you how I really feel. I’ll admit that there might be more important things…

Not just the facts—why framing matters

by N. Gabriel Martin It seems to make sense to start investigating any question by looking at the facts. However, often the question of what the facts are depends on what we decide is worth talking about. In a second season episode of Mad Men the star of the show, philandering drunkard Don Draper, is…

The Science of Empire

by N. Gabriel Martin Henry Ward Beecher was one of the most prominent and influential abolitionists in the US prior to and during the Civil War. He campaigned against the “Compromise of 1850” in which the new state of California, annexed in the Mexican-American war, was agreed to be made a state without slavery in…

Neither selfish, nor stupid: natural selection doesn’t determine human nature; we do

by N. Gabriel Martin In 2017, the Nobel prize in economics attracted more attention than it usually does, when it was awarded to Richard Thaler. Articles in leading newspapers everywhere explained Thaler’s revolutionary insight: whereas economic orthodoxy was premised on the belief that humans are essentially selfish, Thaler’s work assumed that we are also stupid.…

Learning to see the future, or, why I am no longer a conservative

by N. Gabriel Martin When I was younger, I gravitated to conservatism’s deference to the actual. In my suspicion towards the progressive preference for ideas over what just is, it took me a long time to understand that conservatism misunderstands the future and therefore what it is attempting to achieve. Conservatism’s purported ambition to preserve…

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love “Post-Truth”

by N. Gabriel Martin Is it still possible today, in the age of widespread and outlandish conspiracy theories, algorithmically induced filter-bubbles, and bullshitting demagogues, a generation after the US Republican party adopted a strategy of unprincipled obstructionism to anything that their democratic counterparts proposed, to believe that reason has a place in politics? When we…

The Pandemic Has Made Us Scrutinise The Morality Of Our Day To Day Habits—Is That A Good Thing?

by N. Gabriel Martin The pandemic has increased our awareness of the moral significance of our day to day habits. While there have always been moral perfectionists who agonise over every choice and action, most of us tended to draw a line under our day to day habits, taking them for granted and reserving moral…