Part 2 of 3 What Jefferson Got Right — and What We Keep Getting Wrong — About Happiness This article is part of a series published by Human Flourishing in celebration of America's 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Each piece takes one idea from that founding document and asks what it means [...]

Part 1 of 3 Thomas Jefferson, the Founders, and a Better Way to Judge Across Time The Man Who Wrote Freedom Thomas Jefferson was thirty-three years old when he drafted the Declaration of Independence. He worked in a rented room in Philadelphia in the summer of 1776, writing and revising in the heat, producing [...]

The disagreement usually arrives at the table. A grown child comes home carrying a conviction the father doesn't share — about God, or money, or the country, or how a person ought to live — and says it out loud, and the room changes temperature before anyone has decided anything. Everyone feels it. The father [...]

Dale Carnegie wrote the manual on human influence in 1936. Three of his ideas still have something to teach us, and something to offer a divided world. Part 3 of 3 The previous two issues explored respect — why disrespect is the surest way to shut a conversation down, how respect is earned through consistent [...]

On the smartest person in the room — and the rarest skill in any room Part 2 of 3 In the last issue I wrote about respect as the hottest of all hot buttons — the pressure point that, once pressed, shuts down real conversation faster than anything else. The responses I got, and the [...]

Why respect decides whether a conversation opens or shuts down Part 1 of 3 Scroll through almost any comment thread on a contested topic and you can watch one of the oldest patterns in human behavior play out in fast motion. Someone states a position. Someone else challenges it — not the idea, but the person holding it. A third voice joins in. Within [...]

We use three words as if they were one. Patriotism, politics, and partisanship get folded together until it's hard to tell which we mean. Someone who argues fiercely for their side calls it patriotism. Someone worn out by the arguing calls the whole thing politics and decides to sit it out. The blurring feels harmless, [...]

The Declaration's Unfinished Promise Two hundred and fifty years ago, a single sentence changed the world. It is still changing it. In the summer of 1776, a thirty-three-year-old Virginia lawyer sat in a rented room in Philadelphia and wrote what may be the most consequential sentence in the history of democratic governance: "We hold [...]

Memorial Day is for the names. It is sometimes confused with Veterans Day, which honors the living. Memorial Day is for the dead: the men and women whose service ended in service. The day exists because a country that asks people to risk their lives for an aspiration needs a moment, set apart, to acknowledge [...]

How economic interdependence builds the peace that politics cannot. There is a principle hiding in plain sight: countries that trade with each other rarely go to war with each other. A new essay from HumanProgress.org by Walker Wright walks through the evidence, and the underlying scholarship is more consistent than most public conversation about war [...]