The Progress of Opinion

New ideas are often understood to have appeared fully formed from nowhere but, in truth, they almost always have their origin in the work of others. So it was with Charles Darwin’s description of natural selection in On the Origin of Species. In her book, Darwin’s Ghosts: The Secret History of Evolution, Rebecca Stott tells

Getting Better, XII: Even More Progress

Last summer, Oliver Burkeman of The Guardian asked, Is the world really better than ever? Burkeman quoted Philip Collins, Nicholas Kristof, Johan Norberg and Brendan O’Neill as examples of a “loose but growing collection of pundits, academics and thinktank operatives who endorse this stubbornly cheerful, handbasket-free account of our situation.” This group is sometimes labelled