An alliance of German artists and industrialists forged the visual order of contemporary life, from skyscrapers to smartphones. New challenges demand a new elite to rebuild the cultural machinery of industrial civilization.

When the dominant culture abandons cultivating taste and aesthetics through creative excess, they leave open opportunities for once marginal groups to become new elites.

Continent-spanning supply chains that sustained the advanced technology needed by civilization were set up thousands of years ago and then collapsed. It might happen again.

Once a sanctuary for art and invention, Silicon Valley has become co-opted by bureaucracy and disbelief. Its renewal depends on restoring faith in creation itself.

Content generated by artificial intelligence reduces variety and poignant outliers. This harms viewers by training them to want and expect conformism and uniformity.

Florence’s leading medieval family turned a banking career into political power and paradigm shifts in art and science. Their methods hold lessons for philanthropy today.

The practices of industrialized animal farming are aesthetically and morally revolting. These practices can be phased out.

Wealthy aristocrats once demonstrated their power and status by entering government, making war, and funding churches and artists. Though the forms have changed, they still do today.

Activists of often mostly European ancestry have appropriated prehistoric cultures and are systematically destroying fossils vital to understanding the evolutionary heritage of all humankind.

Archaeological finds hundreds of thousands of years old have shown human settlement of many of the world’s remote islands, challenging our assumptions of a primitive prehistory.

A deep-dive into GDP methodology shows that it is neither objective nor an actual measure of production. Serious people should stop using it.

Students in Romania are sharply sorted with meritocratic tests. The result is a nation punching above its weight intellectually, but not necessarily capturing the benefits.

Bureaucratic science is already generously funded and does not need more private support. Philanthropists should fund young outsiders, like during the Golden Age of Science.

Factories and offices will always generate far more wealth than hotels and restaurants. Growing tourism is a sign of economic stagnation, not dynamism.

The practice of archaeology is almost unique to our contemporary Western civilization rather than universal, and it is unlikely to be continued by future civilizations.

The vast majority of the UK’s mineral wealth lies undiscovered in the vast icy territory. It offers a test and challenge worthy of a national effort.