“Time is a flat circle,” Rust Cohle famously opined. I’ve always taken that as another form of the biblical proclamation that there’s nothing new under the sun. I think about that on New Year’s Day, as we unite in contrived joy at the rolling over of our astronomical odometer.

Declaring today to be no different than yesterday because of an arbitrary date change is neither novel nor insightful. But it might be worth considering in a year when we were once again reminded how craven and unreliable humanity really is—especially in the western world.

One of the great things about education is that it forces you to think about uncomfortable truths—in this case, the classic “trilemma” and the Westphalian model of statehood. Or in layman’s terms...is democracy all it’s cracked up to be? Has our focus on the individual doomed us?

It strikes me that one of our great failings as humans is that of imagination—rather, our consistent inability to imagine the comfortable, constant structures of our personal worlds crumbling. We are prisoners of the present in that way.

If I could back to 2000 and tell you that in 20 years the Twin Towers would be gone, we’d be embroiled in two decades of war, we’d have a President who supports groups that claim “6MWE” and Mary Ann from Gilligan’s Island would be one of 250k+ Americans who died of a plague...