Principles of the self

By 2025, search engines and recommendation systems have moved beyond mere tools for retrieving information—they’ve become extensions of human cognition, functioning as externalized brains. Powered by advances in indexing, vector databases, and cross-referencing technologies, these systems reshape how we process knowledge. But as they grow indispensable, we must confront a critical question: Are they enhancing our thinking, or are we outsourcing it entirely?

In 1587, Queen Elizabeth I’s spymaster, Francis Walsingham, achieved one of the great coups in the history of espionage. Using little more than intercepted letters, ciphers, and the occasional tortured confession, Walsingham exposed the Babington Plot, a conspiracy to assassinate Elizabeth and place Mary, Queen of Scots, on the throne. Walsingham's reward? Eternal gratitude from the queen, the continued survival of Protestant England—and, one imagines, the sort of satisfaction that only comes from outwitting murderous aristocrats. His tools were crude, but his mission was clear: decode the enemy before they destroy you.

It is the tragicomic fate of the American republic that it continues to lurch from the doddering to the demagogic, from the vacuously polite to the vulgarian grotesque, as though it were trapped in a slapstick routine without a punchline. Were this not the world’s most powerful nation, it might simply elicit pity. Instead, it commands a mix of horror and schadenfreude from those outside its borders and outright despair from those within.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, though rarely admitted in polite company, that Donald Trump’s economic ideas have the intellectual rigor of a soggy cocktail napkin. Yet here we are, in 2025, once again grappling with his devotion to tariffs—or as he might call them, the Mona Lisa of economic policy. Tariffs, that ancient tool of mercantilist folly, are now poised to drag the world economy backward, one ham-fisted policy at a time.

History, that tireless collector of humanity’s worst decisions, is littered with tales of leaders who rose to power not by the weight of their ideas but by the clever branding of their banners—often as empty as the heads waving them. The fall of Mrs Harris as a political force, and her Democratic Party’s fixation on identity politics, is yet another grim chapter in this story—a warning about the perils of elevating symbolism over substance.

Amidst a parade of electric vehicles that resemble sullen rectangles and expressionless bars of soap, Rivian's R3 emerges as a pleasant anomaly—proof that design doesn't have to surrender to the soulless tyranny of efficiency. It doesn’t look like it was drawn by an algorithm on a tight deadline, nor does it aspire to double as a Blade Runner prop. Instead, it dares to be approachable, elegant, and, most shockingly of all, human. The R3 suggests that the electric future need not sacrifice warmth and charm at the altar of technological inevitability.

There was a time, not so distant, when the artist’s labor was a rebellion against oblivion—a furious demand to be seen, heard, or understood across the gulfs of time. Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro wrestled with mortality itself; James Joyce redefined the limits of language as though daring humanity to keep up. Today, that struggle has been outsourced to a cold and unfeeling steward: the Algorithm, a faceless arbiter whose only metric is engagement, a deity whose offerings are served with a side of irrelevance.

In the austere marble visions of ancient Rome, a full life was conceived as a mosaic of many parts, each tessera contributing its own brilliance to the greater whole. The ideal citizen of the Republic was expected to begin as a soldier, honing body and spirit on the battlefield. This was no mere martial posturing; it was a rite of passage, a crucible through which courage and discipline were forged. The next phase called for the role of merchant or entrepreneur, extracting profit from the unruly seas of commerce and learning the art of negotiation and resourcefulness. Finally, when wisdom had been chiseled by the hand of experience, the citizen would ascend to politics—a domain for the wrinkled and worldly, where philosophical musings and rhetorical flourishes danced uneasily with power plays and poison-tipped daggers. This triptych of soldier, merchant, and statesman was no accidental sequence; it was a deliberate strategy, a life philosophy that embraced the full spectrum of human potential.

If history has taught us anything, it’s that autocrats come in two flavors: the tyrannical genius and the petty despot. Vladimir Putin—a man whose cult of personality hinges on shirtless photo ops and a permanent sneer—is firmly in the latter camp. A Machiavellian mastermind? Hardly. This is a man whose greatest achievements include turning Russia into an economic afterthought and staging the geopolitical equivalent of a high school drama club production.

In a world saturated with noise—literal, visual, and ideological—it is increasingly rare to encounter spaces that insist upon silence. Yet this is precisely what the work of Tadao Ando accomplishes: an audacious refusal to capitulate to the clamor of modernity. Ando’s structures, which temper the severity of concrete with the capriciousness of light, are not mere buildings but sanctuaries for the mind and soul. They embody a principle that has been all but forgotten in contemporary architecture: the power of restraint.

In 1916, Edward Johnston designed the typeface for the London Underground, a system as labyrinthine as it was revolutionary. Johnston’s task was not merely to create legible signage but to craft a typographic identity that would unify a sprawling and disjointed network. The result, his eponymous typeface, was a study in disciplined elegance: humanist proportions, clean geometry, and an innate sense of balance. It didn’t just guide commuters; it gave the city’s chaotic modernity a sense of order and calm. Johnston understood that type wasn’t a passive component of design but an active force, shaping perception and experience at the most visceral level.

To understand Marcel Proust is to accept the absurd and improbable fact that one of the greatest literary achievements in human history emerged not from a life of action, but from one of inaction—a life largely spent in bed. And not just any bed, mind you, but a fortress of hypersensitivity, meticulously arranged to shield its inhabitant from the twin horrors of modernity: noise and drafts.

There’s something delightful about a book that takes a subject as unsexy as “why stuff doesn’t fall over” and manages to make it both fascinating and, dare I say, funny. J.E. Gordon’s Structures: Or Why Things Don’t Fall Down is that rare sort of book—one that sneaks into your brain disguised as entertainment but leaves you a bit smarter, slightly smugger, and much more suspicious of bridges.

On my office shelf, a photograph of my father stands watch—silent, unchanging, and, in a way, unknowable. In it, he carries wood planks over his shoulder, his grin a fragment of unselfconscious joy. Behind him, the ski chalet he restored stands like a monument to competence and optimism. It’s the sort of picture that captures a person not as they were in their totality but as they might wish to be remembered—a distillation, free of the messier truths of illness, fatigue, or the gradual erosion of character that time so often imposes.