Philosophy

The Courage to Be Happy Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga, 2016 Executive Summary Three years after the conversations in The Courage to Be Disliked, the young man returns to the philosopher’s study. He has become a teacher, tried to put Adler into practice in a real classroom, and watched it fail. The theory that once freed him now looks like an abstraction fit for a study and useless in a room full of children. The philosopher does not retreat. He argues that the young man has mistaken the map for the territory, and the second dialogue takes up the question the first book left unanswered: not how to be free of other people’s expectations, but what freedom is meant to accomplish. ...

The Obstacle Is the Way Ryan Holiday, 2014 Executive Summary Ryan Holiday’s breakout book is the one that carried Stoicism out of the classics section and into the locker room. It opens on a single passage from Marcus Aurelius, written in a tent on the Danube frontier: the impediment to action advances action, and what stands in the way becomes the way. Holiday takes that line as a formula and spends the rest of the book showing it at work across two millennia of lives that were blocked, and then unblocked. The thesis: the obstacle is not what stands between you and your goal. It is the raw material the goal is made from. ...

Peter, I am writing this in the open because you have never hidden what you think, and what you think deserves an answer longer than a post. I have read you for years, not the caricature but the actual essays. The Education of a Libertarian is the clearest thing you have ever written, and I want to begin by saying the thing almost no one who disagrees with you is willing to say. ...

On Tuesday, September 8, a 28-year-old researcher named Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic and said the people building the technology believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This week, the story did not fade, as stories usually do. It compounded. Evan Hubinger, Anthropic’s alignment lead, said he personally believed there was a greater than 10 percent chance AI could kill all humans within the next decade, and that the field did not yet have a plan to solve alignment.1 Paul Christiano, the former head of safety at the US Commerce Department’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation, said the recent pace of capability gains gave him “a meaningful risk that rapid acceleration in AI capabilities leads to catastrophic and irreversible loss of control in the very near term.”2 Two researchers named Wang, one at OpenAI and one at Anthropic, posted within hours of each other that recursive self-improvement was the danger “hard to overstate” and that “there is not yet a viable scientific plan” to make it safe.3 OpenAI’s chief scientist wrote that he expects the speed of progress to carry into systems that increasingly drive their own development, and called it “a time that calls for extreme caution,” adding, “I am concerned no one is prepared for the consequences of a continued rapid rise in machine intelligence.”4 ...

On Tuesday, September 8, 2026, a 28-year-old researcher named Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic and posted his reasons on X. He had previously worked at OpenAI. He wrote that neither company was acting responsibly, that they were “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” and that the people building the technology “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”1 Two of his colleagues, still employed, backed him up. Evan Hubinger, a lead in Anthropic’s alignment division, wrote that he personally believed there was a greater than 10 percent chance AI could kill all humans within the next decade, and that the industry did not yet have a plan to solve alignment.2 Samuel Marks, Anthropic’s scalable oversight lead, added the line that should have stopped the conversation: “In general, the more senior the employee, the more concerned they are.”3 ...

The fountain pen is a small object with a large argument inside it. Every serious pen is a thesis about what writing is for, and no two pens argue the point more cleanly than the Lamy 2000 and the Waterman Carène. Both are modern classics, both have been in production for decades, and both cost roughly the same money. They could not be less alike. One is a German machine that hides its nib; the other is a French yacht that displays it. Choosing between them is not choosing between two pens. It is choosing between two theories of the examined life. ...

The Architecture of Autonomy: A Stoic Synthesis of the Montessori Method Abstract This essay examines the philosophical convergence between the Montessori method of education and the ethical framework of Stoicism. It argues that Maria Montessori’s emphasis on the “prepared environment” and the “absorbent mind” represents a practical application of the Stoic concept of prohairesis (volition) and askēsis (disciplined training). By analyzing the role of agency in early childhood development, this paper posits that the Montessori method does not merely facilitate learning but serves as a pedagogical vehicle for the cultivation of a Stoic-aligned internal locus of control. This synthesis provides a robust theoretical foundation for neurodivergence-affirming education, framing autonomy not as a result of maturity, but as a primary catalyst for it. ...

On Proportion The Discipline of Matching Response to Scale Executive Summary On Proportion examines the lost discipline of matching response to scale: knowing when a situation demands attention and when it demands inattention, when intervention is warranted and when silence is the better instrument. It treats proportion not as moderation but as judgment: the capacity to sense the true size of an event and to resist the distortions of urgency, outrage, and habit. The core message: the right-sized response is not a compromise. It is a precision. ...

The fountain pen is one of the few tools in daily life that can be described, without exaggeration, as a civilizational artifact. It sits at the intersection of engineering and culture, precision and ritual, the mechanical and the expressive. And yet, for most of its history, the story of the fountain pen has been told primarily as a Western narrative, a procession of inventors and patents moving from Paris to New York, with the fuller, stranger, more interesting story left largely untold. That story involves two countries that approached the same instrument from profoundly different directions and produced two of the most distinctive pen-making traditions in the world: Germany and Japan. ...

I will not write a memoir. I have lived long enough to know that the full account of a life requires a distance I have not yet achieved, and a candor that would cost more than it would clarify. But Misaligned is as close as I expect to get. It is not a confessional. It does not ask for sympathy. It examines, as honestly as I am capable of examining, what happens when the wrong map is applied (with discipline, with genuine effort, with the best intentions available) to the territory of a life. ...