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the lesson in Virginia, as the Washington Post reporter Paul Farhi wrote at the time, was that nothing exceeds the value of shoe-leather reporting, given that politics is an essentially human endeavor and therefore can defy prediction and reason.

Yet when Mr. Trump showed up on the scene, it was as if that had never happened.

It was another thing to declare, as The Huffington Post did, that coverage of his campaign could be relegated to the entertainment section (and to add a disclaimer to articles about him) and still another to give Mr. Trump a “2 percent” chance at the nomination despite strong polls in his favor, as FiveThirtyEight did six months before the first votes were cast.

Predictions that far out can be viewed as being all in good fun. But in Mr. Trump’s case, they also arguably sapped the journalistic will to scour his record as aggressively as those of his supposedly more serious rivals. In other words, predictions can have consequences.

The problems weren’t at all only due to the reliance on data. Don’t forget those moments that were supposed to have augured Mr. Trump’s collapse: the certainty that once the race narrowed to two or three candidates, Mr. Trump would be through, and what at one point became the likelihood of a contested convention.

That’s all the more reason in the coming months to be as sharply focused on the data we don’t have as we are on the data we do have (and maybe watching out for making any big predictions about the fall based on the polling of today). But a good place to start would be to get a good night’s sleep, and then talk to some voters.

The top brain comprises the entire parietal lobe and the top (and larger) portion of the frontal lobe. The bottom comprises the smaller remainder of the frontal lobe and all of the occipital and temporal lobes.

research reveals that the top-brain system uses information about the surrounding environment (in combination with other sorts of information, such as emotional reactions and the need for food or drink) to figure out which goals to try to achieve. It actively formulates plans, generates expectations about what should happen when a plan is executed and then, as the plan is being carried out, compares what is happening with what was expected, adjusting the plan accordingly.

The bottom-brain system organizes signals from the senses, simultaneously comparing what is being perceived with all the information previously stored in memory. It then uses the results of such comparisons to classify and interpret the object or event, allowing us to confer meaning on the world.

The top- and bottom-brain systems always work together, just as the hemispheres always do. Our brains are not engaged in some sort of constant cerebral tug of war

Although the top and bottom parts of the brain are always used during all of our waking lives, people do not rely on them to an equal degree. To extend the bicycle analogy, not everyone rides a bike the same way. Some may meander, others may race.

You can use the top-brain system to develop simple and straightforward plans, as required by a situation—or you have the option to use it to develop detailed and complex plans (which are not imposed by a situation).

Our theory predicts that people fit into one of four groups, based on their typical use of the two brain systems. Depending on the degree to which a person uses the top and bottom systems in optional ways, he or she will operate in one of four cognitive modes: Mover, Perceiver, Stimulator and Adaptor.

Mover mode results when the top- and bottom-brain systems are both highly utilized in optional ways. Oprah Winfrey

According to the theory, people who habitually rely on Mover mode are most comfortable in positions that allow them to plan, act and see the consequences of their actions. They are well suited to being leaders.

Perceiver mode results when the bottom-brain system is highly utilized in optional ways but the top is not. Think of the Dalai Lama or Emily Dickinson

People who habitually rely on Perceiver mode try to make sense in depth of what they perceive; they interpret their experiences, place them in context and try to understand the implications.

such people—including naturalists, pastors, novelists—typically lead lives away from the limelight. Those who rely on this mode often play a crucial role in a group; they can make sense of events and provide a bigger picture

Stimulator mode, which results when the top-brain system is highly utilized but the bottom is not. According to our theory, people who interact with the world in Stimulator mode often create and execute complex and detailed plans (using the top-brain system) but fail to register consistently and accurately the consequences of acting on those plans

they may not always note when enough is enough. Their actions can be disruptive, and they may not adjust their behavior appropriately.

Examples of people who illustrate Stimulator mode would include Tiger Woods

Adaptor mode, which results when neither the top- nor the bottom-brain system is highly utilized in optional ways. People who think in this mode are not caught up in initiating plans, nor are they fully focused on classifying and interpreting what they experience. Instead, they become absorbed by local events and the immediate requirements of the situation

They are responsive and action-oriented and tend to "go with the flow." Others see them as free-spirited and fun to be with.

those who typically operate in Adaptor mode can be valuable team members. In business, they often form the backbone of an organization, carrying out essential operations.

No one mode is "better" than the others. Each is more or less useful in different circumstances, and each contributes something useful to a team. Our theory leads us to expect that you can work with others most productively when you are aware not just of the strengths and weakness of their preferred modes but also of the strengths and weakness of your own preferred mode

Although there has been a decline in the study of foreign languages in other parts of the UK, England and Scotland have both introduced policies to increase the provision.

"We're having to work much harder to make it more fun, desirable - they don't see languages as being as important as the core subjects and I don't think that schools do generally either with literacy, numeracy and science seen as more important over subjects like language

"As you all know, I went through a really fun time the last 15 months with lots of different people investigating me too, right?"

all of that happened last January was, 'Oh, by the way, ... I have a private email server and all my emails were on this private server and I deleted a bunch of them, but they were only personal, and you're going to have to take my word for it cause the servers gone."

"There is a bias," Christie insisted

not the first time the governor suggested media bias was to blame for the fallout of the George Washington Bridge lane closure controversy.

December 2013, a month before the now infamous "time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee" email from a top Christie staffer was revealed, Christie brushed off questions about the lane closures during a Statehouse news conference

"I know you guys are obsessed with this, I'm not. I'm really not. It's not that big a deal," Christie insisted. "Just because press runs around and writes about it, both here and nationally, I know why that is and so do you, let's not pretend it's because of the gravity of the issue. It's because I am a national figure and anything like this will be written a lot about now, so let's not pretend this is some grave thing."

Christie signaled in New Hampshire he's intent on pressing Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner in the 2016 presidential race, on the attacks in Benghazi, Libya that's been a lighting rod for Clinton critics just as the governor declared during a recent trip here that he's done "apologizing" for the Bridgegate scandal

"I don't think there's been nearly enough questions asked about this," Christie said. "We need to ask a lot more questions about Benghazi. We need to get to the bottom of what happened because it does matter, madam secretary."

In the process, fit has become a catchall used to justify hiring people who are similar to decision makers and rejecting people who are not.

The concept of fit first gained traction in the 1980s. The original idea was that if companies hired individuals whose personalities and values — and not just their skills — meshed with an organization’s strategy, workers would feel more attached to their jobs, work harder and stay longer.

in many organizations, fit has gone rogue. I saw this firsthand while researching the hiring practices of the country’s top investment banks, management consultancies and law firms. I interviewed 120 decision makers and spent nine months observing

While résumés (and connections) influenced which applicants made it into the interview room, interviewers’ perceptions of fit strongly shaped who walked out with job offers.

Crucially, though, for these gatekeepers, fit was not about a match with organizational values. It was about personal fit. In these time- and team-intensive jobs, professionals at all levels of seniority reported wanting to hire people with whom they enjoyed hanging out and could foresee developing close relationships with

To judge fit, interviewers commonly relied on chemistry. “

Many used the “airport test.” As a managing director at an investment bank put it, “Would I want to be stuck in an airport in Minneapolis in a snowstorm with them?”

interviewers were primarily interested in new hires whose hobbies, hometowns and biographies matched their own. Bonding over rowing college crew, getting certified in scuba, sipping single-malt Scotches in the Highlands or dining at Michelin-starred restaurants was evidence of fit; sharing a love of teamwork or a passion for pleasing clients was not

it has become a common feature of American corporate culture. Employers routinely ask job applicants about their hobbies and what they like to do for fun, while a complementary self-help industry informs white-collar job seekers that chemistry, not qualifications, will win them an offer.

Selection based on personal fit can keep demographic and cultural diversity low

In the elite firms I studied, the types of shared experiences associated with fit typically required large investments of time and money.

Class-biased definitions of fit are one reason investment banks, management consulting firms and law firms are dominated by people from the highest socioeconomic backgrounds

Also, whether the industry is finance, high-tech or fashion, a good fit in most American corporations still tends to be stereotypically masculine.

Perhaps most important, it is easy to mistake rapport for skill. Just as they erroneously believe that they can accurately tell when someone is lying, people tend to be overly confident in their ability to spot talent. Unstructured interviews, which are the most popular hiring tools for American managers and the primary way they judge fit, are notoriously poor predictors of job performance.

Organizations that use cultural fit for competitive advantage tend to favor concrete tools like surveys and structured interviews that systematically test behaviors associated with increased performance and employee retention.

For managers who want to use cultural fit in a more productive way, I have several suggestions.

First, communicate a clear and consistent idea of what the organization’s culture is (and is not) to potential employees. Second, make sure the definition of cultural fit is closely aligned with business goals. Ideally, fit should be based on data-driven analysis of what types of values, traits and behaviors actually predict on-the-job success. Third, create formal procedures like checklists for measuring fit, so that assessment is not left up to the eyes (and extracurriculars) of the beholder.

But cultural fit has become a new form of discrimination that keeps demographic and cultural diversity down

when parents, grandparents and Little League coaches became core users of Facebook, kids naturally gravitated to new places where they could socialize away from the watchful eye of adults, experts say.

“The worst stuff happens on the anonymous sites because people are either too scared to say something to someone’s face or they want to present someone with public humiliation,” Olivia said.

Numerous psychological studies show conflict is often resolved when people talk face-to-face. When people can see signs of sadness or other emotions, they tend to back down. Facebook said the majority of users who are flagged for abusive or bullying conduct never do it again. On the anonymous sites, there are no such brakes on negative behavior.

That the dust-up at Old Dominion made international headlines may indicate the outrage cycle is ever-churning and the bawdy tastes of cable news are unflinching—but it also hints at something worthwhile: that how women feel might finally be worthy of attention, and even corrective action, on college campuses and in wider culture.

Most people successfully avoided reading until about 300 years ago. It was about then that Western European priests and princes decided that everyone should be taught to read. These literacy-loving types tried various schemes to make common folks literate; the most effective of these, however, was naked coercion. By the nineteenth century, churches and states all over Europe and North America were forcing parents to send their kids to school to learn to read

So it happened that by the early twentieth century most people in Western Europe and North America could read. They had no choice in the matter. They still don’t.

Why don’t most people like to read? The answer is surprisingly simple: humans weren’t evolved to read. Note that we have no reading organs: our eyes and brains were made for watching, not for decoding tiny symbols on mulch sheets. To prepare our eyes and brains for reading, we must rewire them. This process takes years of hard work to accomplish, and some people never accomplish it all. Moreover, even after you’ve learned to read, you probably won’t find reading to be very much fun. It consumes all of your attention, requires active thought, and makes your eyes hurt. For most people, then, reading is naturally hard and, therefore, something to be avoided if at all possible.

we have misidentified the “problem” facing us: it is not the much-bemoaned reading gap, but rather a seldom-mentioned knowledge gap. Though it is immodest to say, we readers genuinely know more than those who do not read. Thus we are usually able to make better-informed decisions than non-readers can.

If we lived in an aristocracy of readers, this maldistribution of knowledge might be acceptable. But we don’t; rather, we live in a democracy (if we are lucky). In a democracy, the people – readers and non-readers alike – decide. Thus we would like all citizens to be knowledgeable so that they can make well-informed decisions about our common affairs. This has been a central goal of the Reading Class since the literacy-loving Enlightenment.

If we in the Reading Class want to teach the the reading-averse public more effectively than we have in the past, we must rid ourselves of our reading fetish and admit that we’ve been falling down on the job. Once we take this painful step, then a number of interesting options for closing the knowledge gap become available. The most promising of these options is using audio and video to share what we know with the public at large.

We have to laboriously learn to read, but we are born with the ability to watch and listen. We don’t find reading terribly pleasant, but we do find watching and listening generally enjoyable.

The results of this “natural experiment” are in: people would much rather watch/listen than read. This is why Americans sit in front of the television for three hours a day, while they read for only a tiny fraction of that time.

Our task, then, is to give them something serious to watch and listen to, something that conveys the richness and complexity of our written work in pictures and sounds. The good news is that we can easily do this.

Today any lecturer can produce and distribute high quality audio and video programs. Most scholars have the equipment on their desks (that is, a PC). The software is dead simple and inexpensive. And the shows themselves can be distributed the world over on the Internet for almost nothing.

I’ve done it. Here are two examples. The first is New Books in History, an author-interview podcast featuring historians with new books. Aside from the computer, the total hardware and software start-up costs were roughly $300. It took me no time to learn the software thanks to some handy on-line tutorials available on Lynda.com. Today New Books in History has a large international audience.

The “new books” podcasts are not about serious books; they are about the ideas trapped in those serious, and seriously un-read, books. Books imprison ideas; the “new books” podcasts set them free.)

About 4,500 former players are suing the National Football League (NFL) over head injuries suffered during their careers. They are close to a settlement worth about $1bn (£655m).

Rice estimates he suffered between 15 and 20 concussions playing American Football from the age of eight.

"I had my fair share of fun in the NFL," he said. "Unfortunately, I wasn't educated enough on what concussions can lead to. The brain studies by the doctors will be huge to help, maybe prevent."

“The Apple Watch is the most personal device we have ever created,” he said. “It’s not just with you, it’s on you.”

From here on out, there is no down time, and no excuses for reality escapes. You are connected, 24/7.

There is some evidence that heavy smartphone use makes you dumber. The theory is that a having the world at the other end of a mobile search makes for lazy minds, while people who depend less on their devices develop more analytical skills.

Add to this concerns about privacy: that the watch is a tracking device, which sends all your personal information to a central database — a corporate control center that already knows far too much about the preferences and habits of smartphone users.

It is clear that these products are designed to be maximally addictive, in order to harvest as much of our attention as they can. Tech humanists say this business model is both unhealthy and inhumane – that it damages our psychological well-being and conditions us to behave in ways that diminish our humanity

The main solution that they propose is better design. By redesigning technology to be less addictive and less manipulative, they believe we can make it healthier – we can realign technology with our humanity and build products that don’t “hijack” our minds.

its most prominent spokesman is executive director Tristan Harris, a former “design ethicist” at Google who has been hailed by the Atlantic magazine as “the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience”. Harris has spent years trying to persuade the industry of the dangers of tech addiction.

In February, Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire founder of eBay, launched a related initiative: the Tech and Society Solutions Lab, which aims to “maximise the tech industry’s contributions to a healthy society”.

the tech humanists are making a bid to become tech’s loyal opposition. They are using their insider credentials to promote a particular diagnosis of where tech went wrong and of how to get it back on track

The real reason tech humanism matters is because some of the most powerful people in the industry are starting to speak its idiom. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel has warned about social media’s role in encouraging “mindless scrambles for friends or unworthy distractions”,

In short, the effort to humanise computing produced the very situation that the tech humanists now consider dehumanising: a wilderness of screens where digital devices chase every last instant of our attention.

After years of ignoring their critics, industry leaders are finally acknowledging that problems exist. Tech humanists deserve credit for drawing attention to one of those problems – the manipulative design decisions made by Silicon Valley.

these decisions are only symptoms of a larger issue: the fact that the digital infrastructures that increasingly shape our personal, social and civic lives are owned and controlled by a few billionaires

Because it ignores the question of power, the tech-humanist diagnosis is incomplete – and could even help the industry evade meaningful reform

Taken up by leaders such as Zuckerberg, tech humanism is likely to result in only superficial changes

they will not address the origin of that anger. If anything, they will make Silicon Valley even more powerful.

To the litany of problems caused by “technology that extracts attention and erodes society”, the text asserts that “humane design is the solution”. Drawing on the rhetoric of the “design thinking” philosophy that has long suffused Silicon Valley, the website explains that humane design “starts by understanding our most vulnerable human instincts so we can design compassionately”

this language is not foreign to Silicon Valley. On the contrary, “humanising” technology has long been its central ambition and the source of its power. It was precisely by developing a “humanised” form of computing that entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs brought computing into millions of users’ everyday lives

Facebook had a new priority: maximising “time well spent” on the platform, rather than total time spent. By “time well spent”, Zuckerberg means time spent interacting with “friends” rather than businesses, brands or media sources. He said the News Feed algorithm was already prioritising these “more meaningful” activities.

They believe we can use better design to make technology serve human nature rather than exploit and corrupt it. But this idea is drawn from the same tradition that created the world that tech humanists believe is distracting and damaging us.

Tech humanists say they want to align humanity and technology. But this project is based on a deep misunderstanding of the relationship between humanity and technology: namely, the fantasy that these two entities could ever exist in separation.

The story of our species began when we began to make tools

All of which is to say: humanity and technology are not only entangled, they constantly change together.

This is not just a metaphor. Recent research suggests that the human hand evolved to manipulate the stone tools that our ancestors used

The ways our bodies and brains change in conjunction with the tools we make have long inspired anxieties that “we” are losing some essential qualities

Yet as we lose certain capacities, we gain new ones.

The nature of human nature is that it changes. It can not, therefore, serve as a stable basis for evaluating the impact of technology

Yet the assumption that it doesn’t change serves a useful purpose. Treating human nature as something static, pure and essential elevates the speaker into a position of power. Claiming to tell us who we are, they tell us how we should be.

Holding humanity and technology separate clears the way for a small group of humans to determine the proper alignment between them

Harris and his fellow tech humanists also frequently invoke the language of public health. The Center for Humane Technology’s Roger McNamee has gone so far as to call public health “the root of the whole thing”, and Harris has compared using Snapchat to smoking cigarettes

The public-health framing casts the tech humanists in a paternalistic role. Resolving a public health crisis requires public health expertise. It also precludes the possibility of democratic debate. You don’t put the question of how to treat a disease up for a vote – you call a doctor.

They also remain confined to the personal level, aiming to redesign how the individual user interacts with technology rather than tackling the industry’s structural failures. Tech humanism fails to address the root cause of the tech backlash: the fact that a small handful of corporations own our digital lives and strip-mine them for profit.

This is a fundamentally political and collective issue. But by framing the problem in terms of health and humanity, and the solution in terms of design, the tech humanists personalise and depoliticise it.

Far from challenging Silicon Valley, tech humanism offers Silicon Valley a useful way to pacify public concerns without surrendering any of its enormous wealth and power.

these principles could make Facebook even more profitable and powerful, by opening up new business opportunities. That seems to be exactly what Facebook has planned.

reported that total time spent on the platform had dropped by around 5%, or about 50m hours per day. But, Zuckerberg said, this was by design: in particular, it was in response to tweaks to the News Feed that prioritised “meaningful” interactions with “friends” rather than consuming “public content” like video and news. This would ensure that “Facebook isn’t just fun, but also good for people’s well-being”

Zuckerberg said he expected those changes would continue to decrease total time spent – but “the time you do spend on Facebook will be more valuable”. This may describe what users find valuable – but it also refers to what Facebook finds valuable

not all data is created equal. One of the most valuable sources of data to Facebook is used to inform a metric called “coefficient”. This measures the strength of a connection between two users – Zuckerberg once called it “an index for each relationship”

Facebook records every interaction you have with another user – from liking a friend’s post or viewing their profile, to sending them a message. These activities provide Facebook with a sense of how close you are to another person, and different activities are weighted differently.

Messaging, for instance, is considered the strongest signal. It’s reasonable to assume that you’re closer to somebody you exchange messages with than somebody whose post you once liked.

Why is coefficient so valuable? Because Facebook uses it to create a Facebook they think you will like: it guides algorithmic decisions about what content you see and the order in which you see it. It also helps improve ad targeting, by showing you ads for things liked by friends with whom you often interact

emphasising time well spent means creating a Facebook that prioritises data-rich personal interactions that Facebook can use to make a more engaging platform.

“time well spent” means Facebook can monetise more efficiently. It can prioritise the intensity of data extraction over its extensiveness. This is a wise business move, disguised as a concession to critics

industrialists had to find ways to make the time of the worker more valuable – to extract more money from each moment rather than adding more moments. They did this by making industrial production more efficient: developing new technologies and techniques that squeezed more value out of the worker and stretched that value further than ever before.

there is another way of thinking about how to live with technology – one that is both truer to the history of our species and useful for building a more democratic future. This tradition does not address “humanity” in the abstract, but as distinct human beings, whose capacities are shaped by the tools they use.

It sees us as hybrids of animal and machine – as “cyborgs”, to quote the biologist and philosopher of science Donna Haraway.

The cyborg way of thinking, by contrast, tells us that our species is essentially technological. We change as we change our tools, and our tools change us. But even though our continuous co-evolution with our machines is inevitable, the way it unfolds is not. Rather, it is determined by who owns and runs those machines. It is a question of power

The various scandals that have stoked the tech backlash all share a single source. Surveillance, fake news and the miserable working conditions in Amazon’s warehouses are profitable. If they were not, they would not exist. They are symptoms of a profound democratic deficit inflicted by a system that prioritises the wealth of the few over the needs and desires of the many.

If being technological is a feature of being human, then the power to shape how we live with technology should be a fundamental human right

The decisions that most affect our technological lives are far too important to be left to Mark Zuckerberg, rich investors or a handful of “humane designers”. They should be made by everyone, together.

Rather than trying to humanise technology, then, we should be trying to democratise it. We should be demanding that society as a whole gets to decide how we live with technology

What does this mean in practice? First, it requires limiting and eroding Silicon Valley’s power.

Antitrust laws and tax policy offer useful ways to claw back the fortunes Big Tech has built on common resources

democratic governments should be making rules about how those firms are allowed to behave – rules that restrict how they can collect and use our personal data, for instance, like the General Data Protection Regulation

This means developing publicly and co-operatively owned alternatives that empower workers, users and citizens to determine how they are run.

we might demand that tech firms pay for the privilege of extracting our data, so that we can collectively benefit from a resource we collectively create.

Originally

These days, ethical wills are nonbinding documents that are increasingly seen as important legacy-building ingredients, say experts, because they can convey a person’s deep inner values and beliefs, even helping soothe ruffled feathers when dispensing family assets.

They may explain how the family money was made, she said, so that future generations can understand how the monetary legacy is to be used. “Without the glue of the family patriarch or matriarch, conflict is more likely to happen,” she added.

an oral tradition, ethical wills have been used by Jewish people for centuries to pass on life lessons and ethics, such as the importance of charity. In the 11th century, ethical wills began to be written down, and some still exist in archives.

Mr. Friedman said that video wills were especially effective because messages were best heard when conveyed through tone of voice or posture. “Being appropriately emotional in a video adds more dimensions than just words on paper,” he said.

“People can even do video selfies.”

To coax storytelling, Ms. Bell uses a 20-question questionnaire that touches on a person’s values and philosophies. “But the point is keeping it simple and fun,” she said.

Though high-tech ethical wills can be inviting, they aren’t for everyone, Ms. Turnbull said. “Writing is enduring and timeless,” she said. “It’s an archive that can be printed.” Conversely, high-tech wills can become outmoded. “What happens if video is outdated in a generation?”

ethical wills can also deepen our own lives, said Mr. Baines. “Today, we don’t take time to self-reflect,” he said. “But putting together an ethical will early on helps you live life with more intention.” That way, life can be richer, he said, adding: "We’re built for story and narrative.”

ceremony honors what has taken place. But ritual is a sequence of actions that symbolically walk you through the inner change the new stage of life will require.

Rituals also comfort because they concretize spiritual experiences.

over 60 percent of Judaism’s 613 commandments involve physical ritual: lighting candles, ritual baths, etc. These deeds are a kind of language, a way of expressing things that are too deep for words.

Rituals encourage you to be more intentional about life. People can understand their lives’ meaning only if they step out of their immediate moment and see what came before them and what they will leave behind when they are gone.

There should be a ritual for that moment, often around age 27 or 28, when the young adult leaves the wandering post-school phase and begins to get a sense for the shape and direction of his or her life

naming your limitations, befriending your inner life, realigning your central focus. For example, young adults might create a life map of where they’ve been and hope to go, and present it to their peers

Maybe neighborhoods and towns could come together to make town compacts. They would vow to be a community together and lay out the specific projects

It could be an occasion to tell a new version of the town story; a community is a group of people who share a common story

Most of all, it would be an occasion for people to make promises toward one another — specific ways they are going to use their gifts to solve the common challenge

we’ve shed old rituals without coming up with new ones. We’ve unwittingly robbed ourselves of a social architecture that marks and defines life’s phases

Why do we willingly throw away chances to throw fun parties about important things?

One thing that’s changed tremendously is the presence of women and the change in focus because of that. There’s a lot of interest in literature and philosophy, and using literature as a philosophical examination. It makes me so happy! Because I was seen as a hard-core analytic philosopher, and when I first began to write novels people thought, Oh, and we thought she was serious! But that’s changed entirely. People take literature seriously, especially in moral philosophy, as thought experiments. A lot of the most developed and effective thought experiments come from novels. Also, novels contribute to making moral progress, changing people’s emotions.

The other thing that’s changed is that there’s more applied philosophy. Let’s apply philosophical theory to real-life problems, like medical ethics, environmental ethics, gender issues. This is a real change from when I was in school and it was only theory.

here’s a lot of philosophical progress, it’s just a progress that’s very hard to see. It’s very hard to see because we see with it. We incorporate philosophical progress into our own way of viewing the world.

Plato would be constantly surprised by what we know. And not only what we know scientifically, or by our technology, but what we know ethically. We take a lot for granted. It’s obvious to us, for example, that individual’s ethical truths are equally important.

it’s usually philosophical arguments that first introduce the very outlandish idea that we need to extend rights. And it takes more, it takes a movement, and activism, and emotions, to affect real social change. It starts with an argument, but then it becomes obvious. The tracks of philosophy’s work are erased because it becomes intuitively obvious

The arguments against slavery, against cruel and unusual punishment, against unjust wars, against treating children cruelly—these all took arguments.

About 30 years ago, the philosopher Peter Singer started to argue about the way animals are treated in our factory farms. Everybody thought he was nuts. But I’ve watched this movement grow; I’ve watched it become emotional. It has to become emotional. You have to draw empathy into it. But here it is, right in our time—a philosopher making the argument, everyone dismissing it, but then people start discussing it. Even criticizing it, or saying it’s not valid, is taking it seriously

The question of whether some of these scientific theories are really even scientific. Can we get predictions out of them?

We are very inertial creatures. We do not like to change our thinking, especially if it’s inconvenient for us. And certainly the people in power never want to wonder whether they should hold power.

I’m really trying to draw the students out, make them think for themselves. The more they challenge me, the more successful I feel as a teacher. It has to be very active

Plato used the metaphor that in teaching philosophy, there needs to be a fire in the teacher, and the sheer heat will help the fire grow in the student. It’s something that’s kindled because of the proximity to the heat.

how can you make the case that they should study philosophy?

ches your inner life. You have lots of frameworks to apply to problems, and so many ways to interpret things. It makes life so much more interesting. It’s us at our most human. And it helps us increase our humanity. No matter what you do, that’s an asset.

What do you think are the biggest philosophical issues of our time? The growth in scientific knowledge presents new philosophical issues.

The idea of the multiverse. Where are we in the universe? Physics is blowing our minds about this.

This is what we have to teach our children. Even things that go against their intuition they need to take seriously. What was intuition two generations ago is no longer intuition; and it’s arguments that change i

And with the growth in cognitive science and neuroscience. We’re going into the brain and getting these images of the brain. Are we discovering what we really are? Are we solving the problem of free will? Are we learning that there isn’t any free will? How much do the advances in neuroscience tell us about the deep philosophical issues?

With the decline of religion is there a sense of the meaninglessness of life and the easy consumerist answer that’s filling the space religion used to occupy? This is something that philosophers ought to be addressing.