Failure, then, is a tonic for hubris, a lesser ward against the performative narcissism of perfection we wear as both shield and mask to navigate these craven times.

Descartes has long been typecast as the writer of radical separation of mind and body, of rationality above all else—even his contemporaries declared him the murderer of poetry.

We’re in someone’s kitchen; a kid is sitting on the floor.

Books like these area dime a dozen lately. Readers might do well to supplement their reading with Against the Fascist Creep or Theodor Adorno's The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Thomas' Radio Addresses or Julia Boyd's Travelers in the Third Reich or Sebastian Haffner's Defying Hitler.