A R C H I V E

I love politics, stay engaged, and celebrate America’s 250-year experiment in functioning democracy. Politics is a Machiavellian jungle, but the Constitution our Founding Fathers left us, however imperfect, remains humanity’s best operating system for governing ourselves.

At the local level, Boulder is struggling on multiple fronts. When Aquiles La Grave, a relative newcomer with limited political experience, entered the mayoral race promising revolutionary change, voters listened. But when revolution began sounding more like anarchy, cooler heads prevailed. Voters thanked Aquiles for stirring the pot, chose continuity over chaos, and reelected Mayor Aaron Brockett for another two years.

At the state level, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser entered the governor’s race with the Democratic establishment’s blessing. Then Senator Michael Bennet decided he would rather be governor than senator, betting his name recognition would carry the day. Weiser, already a tireless campaigner, doubled his efforts and prevailed. Hard work still matters…

Read More

For fourteen centuries, Christianity and Islam have competed not merely as religions, but as civilizations. The map tells the story. Egypt, once overwhelmingly Christian, became overwhelmingly Muslim. Constantinople, capital of the Christian Byzantine Empire, became Istanbul, capital of the Muslim Ottoman Empire.

Today, the contest is being shaped less by armies than by demography, migration, economics, and Europe’s declining confidence in itself. Europe is getting older and having fewer children. Birth rates across the European Union have fallen far below the 2.1 replacement rate. Meanwhile, immigration has become essential to maintaining its workforce.

Much of that immigration comes from Muslim-majority countries…

Read More

Last week I wrote about France and the Jews as the canary in the coal mine. Today, I look east to Germany.

Germany spent eighty years answering one question: How could the country of Goethe, Beethoven and Kant also become the country of Hitler, Auschwitz and the Final Solution?

Perhaps we should ask another: What happens when Germans become angry again?

For decades, postwar Germany built its identity around prosperity, democracy, European integration and Nie wieder—never again. Then Angela Merkel opened Germany’s doors during the 2015 migrant crisis, ultimately admitting more than a million asylum seekers.

The humanitarian impulse was admirable. The consequences remain contested…

Read More

I recently wrote a column describing Jews as the canary in the coal mine. They are often the first to smell the poison, but rarely the last to die from it.

France, having seemingly forgotten the lessons of the Dreyfus Affair, may be discovering this truth again. Whatever the cause du jour—education funding, school conditions, retirement age—the Palestinian flag appears amid France’s recurring unrest while France itself struggles to maintain order.

France was once one of Israel’s closest allies and its principal arms supplier. Then came de Gaulle. Seeking influence in the Arab world, France turned away from Israel. In 1967, de Gaulle described Jews as an “elite people, sure of themselves and domineering.”

The language changed over the decades. The underlying temptation did not…

Read More

Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged asks what happens when society’s most productive people decide the price of producing has become too high.

They leave.

Colorado voters may soon confront their own version of that question.

Amendment 87 would replace Colorado’s 4.4% flat income tax with six marginal tax brackets, ranging from 3.7% to 8.4% for income above $1 million. Most taxpayers would receive a modest tax cut, while high earners would pay substantially more.

The argument for it is straightforward: those who have benefited most from our economy can afford to contribute more.

But taxes do not exist in a vacuum…

Read More

This week’s attempted hijacking of a Dubai–Tel Aviv flight made me think again about two very different stories emerging from the same conflict.

At the Venice Film Festival, NAZA, a documentary about Israel’s conduct in Gaza, received a 24-minute standing ovation and international attention while presenting a deeply accusatory interpretation of the war.

Meanwhile, Netflix released Season 5 of Fauda.

For four seasons, Fauda was simply terrific television: an Israeli counterterrorism drama in which Jews and Arabs speak each other’s languages, infiltrate each other’s worlds, kill each other, and occasionally understand each other.

Then came October 7…

Read More

I am a big Leonard Cohen fan and, in the past, have written a column on “You Want It Darker.”

Alas, though a brilliant poet and performer, Cohen was still just a man who, despite decades of studying Buddhism, never quite became the Superior Man, the Vitruvian Man, the Übermensch, or the Supernatural Man I’ve written about before.

Nowhere is this tension more evident than in “I’m Your Man.”

Cohen begins by offering a woman everything. He will be her lover, partner, boxer, doctor or driver. Whatever she wants, he will become.

It is seductive, masculine and vulnerable. But listen more closely and imagine him begging on his knees.

Soon the civilized man begins to disappear. The moon is too bright, the chain too tight, and the beast won’t go to sleep. He would beg, crawl, howl and claw. Desire has conquered the man who promised to become anything for his woman…

Read More

Around 1490, Leonardo da Vinci drew one of history’s most recognizable images: a naked man, arms and legs extended, simultaneously inscribed within a square and a circle.

Inspired by the Roman architect Vitruvius, Leonardo was exploring the proportions of the human body. Five centuries later, we can reinterpret his question: What is the measure of a fully developed human being?

The square might represent our earthly existence: body, work, reason, discipline, responsibility and boundaries. The circle represents something less measurable: imagination, love, beauty, wisdom, spirit and our longing for transcendence.

Leonardo’s man inhabits both…

Read More

The ancient Egyptians believed that death was not the end of life, but the beginning of a final judgment.

According to their mythology, the dead entered the Hall of Judgment, where Anubis, guardian of the dead, placed the deceased’s heart on one side of a great scale. On the other rested a single feather representing truth, justice, and moral order.

The question was simple: What did your heart weigh?

A heart in balance with the feather was judged worthy of continuing into the afterlife.

Whatever we may think of their mythology, the Egyptians understood something profound: eventually, our actions must be weighed…

Read More

The ancient Egyptians believed that death was not the end of life, but the beginning of a final judgment.

According to their mythology, the dead entered the Hall of Judgment, where Anubis, guardian of the dead, placed the deceased’s heart on one side of a great scale. On the other rested a single feather representing truth, justice, and moral order.

The question was simple: What did your heart weigh?

A heart in balance with the feather was judged worthy of continuing into the afterlife.

Whatever we may think of their mythology, the Egyptians understood something profound: eventually, our actions must be weighed…

Read More

Since its inception, City Club has striven to be a Securus Locus, a safe place for its members to show up as their best selves and express their opinions without fear of judgment.

But such a place can only thrive within something larger: a high-trust society. Boulder may be unusually well positioned to become one.

Trust is the invisible infrastructure that allows people to live and work together without constantly protecting themselves from one another. In a high-trust society, we begin with the assumption that most people are decent, most promises will be kept, and most disagreements are made in good faith.

That simple assumption changes almost everything…

Read More

The ancient Romans worshipped a curious god named Janus. He had two faces. One looked backward. The other looked forward.

Janus was the god of beginnings and endings, gates and doorways, time and change. Before wars, weddings, journeys, and public ceremonies, the Romans invoked him first because they understood that every important decision stands at the threshold between the past and the future. The month of January bears his name.

His lesson is as relevant today as it was two millennia ago. One face encourages us to remember. The other challenges us to imagine.

Experience without vision becomes stagnation. Vision without experience becomes folly…

Read More

Last Tuesday night, I attended the Boulder Valley School District Board meeting on antisemitism. After the superintendent’s eloquent speech apologizing for the district’s delayed response to antisemitism in schools, the board opened the floor for public comment. I was shocked to hear hatred toward Jews pour out, often disguised as political argument.

America may be more politically polarized than at any time since the Civil War. Yet one disturbing phenomenon has united parts of the far left and far right: renewed hostility toward Jews and Israel.

History suggests that Jews are often civilization’s canary in the coal mine. When a society becomes comfortable excusing intimidation, harassment, or violence against its Jewish minority, it has crossed a moral threshold. The victims rarely remain only Jews…

Read More

Few commands appear more often in the Bible than, “Do not be afraid.” Yet the ancient Greeks understood something more keenly about fear in their worship of a curious god named Pan.

Half man and half goat, he lived in the wilderness, hidden among forests and mountains. Travelers who unexpectedly encountered him were said to be overcome by sudden, irrational terror. From his name comes our word panic.

The Greeks understood something about human nature that we often forget. Fear can arrive without warning. It can spread rapidly until an entire society sees danger everywhere. Every generation believes it is living through history’s greatest crisis.

In my lifetime, we have feared nuclear annihilation, the population explosion, global famine, environmental collapse, Y2K, financial meltdowns, pandemics, and now artificial intelligence. Each threat contained genuine risk. Yet each also inspired predictions that civilization itself was on the verge of ending.

History offers a more hopeful story…

Read More

Socialism begins with an alluring promise: get more, pay less, and work fewer hours. Someone else, usually “the rich,” will pick up the check.

The Democratic Socialists of America propose a 32-hour workweek with full pay, free education from pre-K through college, canceled student debt, housing without landlords, healthcare without insurance, and publicly funded retirement. Food, energy, medicine, and transportation are increasingly treated as “common goods” to be administered collectively. The platform also advocates sharply reducing traditional policing and incarceration, liberalizing immigration, and providing broad pathways to legal status.

It sounds compassionate. It ignores economic reality.

Nothing government provides is free. The cost arrives through taxes, borrowing, inflation, rationing, or declining quality. When politicians control housing, medicine, energy, and transportation, citizens become customers of a monopoly that writes the rules, allocates scarce resources, and decides what is available. Freedom inevitably contracts…

Read More

I recently watched Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey and was reminded why this ancient Greek epic has endured for nearly three millennia. It tells the story of Odysseus’ long and perilous journey home after the Trojan War. Yet it is more than an adventure about monsters, storms, and wandering. It is a meditation on character.

Odysseus survives because he understands that choices have consequences. Promises matter. Oaths are sacred. Homer reminds us that promises, loyalties, and duties are not conveniences to be abandoned when circumstances change. They are the foundation of trust and civilization itself.

The poem also insists that wisdom begins by recognizing the difference between right and wrong. That clarity feels unfashionable today, when every moral judgment is explained away by context or endless qualification. Homer refuses to blur moral responsibility. Mercy has its place, but so does justice. Hospitality toward strangers is not mere courtesy but a sacred obligation…

Read More

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” It is a question we ask children but rarely ourselves.

Most of us spend the first half of life building careers, raising families, accumulating wealth, and earning reputations. Those are worthy pursuits. But eventually a more important question emerges:

Who am I becoming?

The ancient Greeks believed philosophy was not an academic subject but a way of life. The word itself means the love of wisdom. The Stoics often viewed life’s problems backward, asking: Knowing that I will someday die, how important is the problem before me today?

That simple question separates the essential from the trivial…

Read More

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche uses teachings from the ancient Persian prophet Zarathustra for a series of speeches that blend poetry, parable, and prophecy. Through these teachings, Nietzsche explores themes of self-overcoming, the will to power, and the creation of new values in a world where traditional moral foundations have lost their authority.

Considered a masterpiece of existential philosophy, the book challenges readers to transcend human limitations and embrace their highest potential by leveraging the concept of the Übermensch, or “overman”—the embodiment of humanity’s highest possibilities for strength, creativity, wisdom, and self-mastery.

For Zarathustra, the human condition is a continual struggle between what we are and what we might become. Freedom emerges within this tension between creation and destruction, order and chaos, comfort and aspiration. Human beings are not static creatures but works in progress. Our purpose is to actively participate in our own development through disciplined action, meaningful ritual, and the cultivation of constructive thoughts, words, and deeds…

Read More

America’s 250th anniversary is a cause for celebration and an opportunity to reflect on where this great experiment might be headed.

Those questions inspired the creation of the Highland Institute for the Advancement of Humanity, not merely to study the future, but to help shape it by bringing together scientists, entrepreneurs, philosophers, artists, and spiritual leaders in pursuit of human flourishing. Over the years, I have explored the forces shaping our past, present, and possible future.

I generally strive to follow Abraham Lincoln’s example by keeping my columns under 300 words. But on the occasion of America’s 250th anniversary, I feel compelled to set brevity aside and share a broader vision of what I believe could become America’s second founding.

Over the years, I have written frequently about the concept of the Fourth Turning. Historians William Strauss and Neil Howe argue that Anglo-American history tends to unfold in roughly eighty-year cycles. Whether their theory ultimately proves correct or not, the pattern is intriguing.

Looking across American history, I notice four recurring conditions that often accompany periods of profound change: major geopolitical conflicts leading to war, disruptive technological innovation, economic displacement among educated populations, and rising antisemitism. All four conditions are present today. If history offers any guidance, we are approaching another hinge in history.

Human civilization has advanced through an accelerating succession of breakthroughs. Stone tools gave way to bronze, bronze to steel, fire to steam, steam to electricity, electricity to computing, and computing to artificial intelligence. Each breakthrough has shortened the time until the next. Human progress increasingly follows a logarithmic curve rather than a linear one.

While Newton revealed many of the governing laws of the three-dimensional physical world, Einstein transformed our understanding of space and time. Today’s atomic clocks, including those maintained at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, make the Global Positioning System so precise that it can often locate us within feet and, under ideal conditions, even inches.

I believe humanity’s next frontier will not be physical space, but the invisible realm explored by quantum physics—a world governed less by certainty than by probability. Quantum science is already reshaping computing, communications, sensing, cryptography, photonics, and materials science. We are only beginning to glimpse its possibilities…

Read More

I want to begin with a confession: I was wrong about Donald Trump.

I never liked Donald J. Trump as a person, but I respected what he had accomplished and believed he possessed something many recent presidents lacked: a willingness to confront America’s adversaries without apology.

In a world where strongmen like Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin rule through intimidation and force, I thought America needed a leader who could speak their language. After watching America win wars on the battlefield only to lose leverage at the negotiating table, I concluded it was time for the United States to act like the superpower it is.

I believed Trump would be that leader…

Read More