Paradoxically, the problems of politics often arise not in the form of a problem of scarcity, but as one of abundance.

How doe we create the world we want, rather than a world that just happens to us?

We tend to think of the problems of globalization and cultural identity as peculiar to our times. In fact they are rooted in ancient problems of civic belonging.

Socrates was likewise right that pissing people off is how we first, and maybe best, go about the business of provoking thought.

War is smaller in scale than in recent memory, but it is far more ambiguous, intractable, and nasty. Money flows more quickly than ever, but it is still somehow manages to gather and puddle in certain places, for certain people rather then others.

We don't know what the future will bring, but that's because we are ever in the process of creating it, not because it is an alien force to which we have to submit.

Never before, I suspect, have so many people been so rich to so little purpose.