This is an excerpt from my first book, Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations, which explores how people use practices from ancient Greek philosophies in modern life. James Stockdale was a young fighter pilot flying bombing missions over North Vietnam, when his F-8 airplane was hit by anti-aircraft fire…

What do you get if you cross the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual with High School Musical? TikTok! Occasionally some data appears that looks so awful it makes you do a doubletake. That was the case for me this week, when the Centre for Disease Control released data suggesting that American…

It’s every liberal parent’s nightmare. One day they happen to glance at their 14-year-old son’s laptop, and they see he is watching videos by Andrew Tate, the mullah of misogyny. They start to notice red flags in their son’s conversation: ‘bitches’, ‘choke-holds’, ‘feminism is cancer’, ‘Hitler wasn’t all bad’. …

This is a story from our Ecstatic Integration newsletter. If you are interested in psychedelics and other forms of ecstatic experience, and how to integrate them into western cultures, sign up here. Ketamine clinics are booming across the US. According to psychedelic fund PsyMed, there were around 20 ketamine clinics…

This is a story about dangerous ideas, and words’ magical power to heal and to harm. It’s about AI, Charles Manson, dubstep, Neo-Nazis, occultism, and a lot of amphetamine, but it’s mainly about Nicholas Land. In 1993, techno-feminist Sadie Plant set up a research unit in the philosophy department at…

A cult of the entrepreneur mushroomed in the last two decades, but there are signs the cult may have peaked. Being an entrepreneur is arguably the highest status job in the world at the moment. In the 1960s, it was the rock star. In the 1980s-1990s, investment bankers were the…

At the moment I live in a town in Costa Rica called La Fortuna. There was nothing much here apart from farming until the 1980s, when the nearby volcano of Arenal erupted, and it kept on erupting for the next 20 years. Suddenly all the springs and rivers around Arenal…

Googleplex, the Google HQ in Mountain View, California, is an incubator for new religious movements. Ten years ago, Google hired Ray Kurzweil, prophet of the Singularity. In 2015, Google engineer Anthony Levandowski started The Way of the Future, a church to worship super-intelligent AI. …

Anyone hoping to ‘solve’ the mental health crisis should think very carefully: am I going to make it worse? Unfortunately, every decade a new intervention becomes the hot new thing, the magic bullet that is going to save the world, and the people promoting it become wide-eyed evangelists. ‘We are…