la liberté avant tout
DELHI – It’s only fitting that a conference dedicated to the eradication of smoking tobacco would be held in a city caked with smog pollution. Last week in Noida, a southeastern suburb of New Delhi, delegates from over 180 countries filed out of tour buses for the World Health Organization’s seventh Conferences of the Parties…
In a whirlwind of an episode, we cover traveling in Brazil, India, South Africa, and, ah yes, Trump! Will he drain the swamp? Will it remain clogged? Can we use a better shorthand for “racist, sexist, misogynist, islamophobe, homophobe” now? As whites, we’re not sure. Tune in for a supermoon-pack full of analysis and expat…
Fear Not Trump — We Advance Society With Ideas, Not Politics
While the burn of politics and sport may continue to persist, let every individual know that they remain free to create society as they know best. And to achieve that with their own passions for the ideas they hold dear. We don’t need a president for that. As an individual who has primarily made a…
As an individual who has primarily made a career as both a journalist and an advocate for a philosophy, I’m well acquainted with ideas and their impact. I bank on it. Ideas have always been much more powerful for than holders of ideas. Especially politicians like Hillary Clinton or now President-Elect Trump. I’ve come to…
We’re more likely to accept the dogma of Google, Apple, or Microsoft in order to satisfy our daily desire to be connected and loved by the bits, ones, and zeros. Who would have thought that the great decentralized interconnected nature of the millions of computers on the Internet would lend itself to a centralization of…
My debut fiddling with computers was about 20 years ago, in 1996. My dad bought us a Compaq Presario running DOS. My brothers and I were able to learn a few pivotal lines of code, allowing us to boot from the disk and play games like The Incredible Machine, Wolfenstein 3D, and Duke Nukem. After…
When I was a young boy, I remember my grandfather telling me stories of the great emperors and statesmen of the Prussian Empire. He had moved to Canada after the war, but his glorification of Prussia never ceased. Its soldiers fought gallantly, its academics produced reams of important work invoked even today and its statesmen…
It’s an unfortunate fact of the present that Germans must shudder at the mention of their history. Any conversation will reliably either end or begin loyal to Godwin’s law. There will be no discussion of the mature political and economic institutions which created a great civilization out of nothing for hundreds of years in central Europe….
In yet another instance of changing location, Yaël has moved to Prague, Czech Republic. He shares his experiences in Czechia and Todor is already insanely jealous. From there, it’s all about great literature, Pan-Europeanism, bureaucracy, the legacy of great authors, abortion protests in Poland, and why you should never read Paulo Coelho. And a lot of…