FlashFeed

Full text

2026 has been full of ups and downs for Star Wars fans, who were treated to the highest-rated project in franchise history with Maul — Shadow Lord . There was never a doubt for Disney and Lucasfilm that the show was going to be a smash hit, which was proven when it was renewed for Season 2 before a single episode hit the air. The first Star Wars movie since 2019, The Mandalorian and Grogu , unfortunately, didn’t find the same success as the first Disney+ show of the year. The film is expected to be the lowest-grossing Star Wars movie in franchise history by the end of its run, even lower than Solo: A Star Wars Story . However, the bad news for Star Wars fans dates back to 2025, when it was announced that Disney canceled The Hunt for Ben Solo movie starring Adam Driver and directed by Steven Soderbergh .

Full text

If a Martian observed American politics in the 21st century, they’d be forgiven for assuming that the nation’s “two-party system” is codified somewhere in the Constitution. But the Martian would be wrong. The founders, as Dan Carlin notes in this interview, never said a word about the necessity for a constant battle between two parties — nothing about Democrats and Republicans, nothing about the need for any particular number of political factions. That was “not part of the design.”

Carlin often calls himself a “political Martian.” That’s one way of saying that the former reporter and current podcast host tries not to view political issues through the lens of a particular party or tribal affiliation. Instead, he aims for a more objective, long-term view — maybe no surprise if you’ve listened to his podcast Hardcore History , which he launched in 2006 when “podcast” wasn’t yet a household term. Now, everyone has a podcast, but that term still doesn’t quite capture Hardcore History , where Carlin covers momentous historical figures and events through unscripted storytelling in episodes that often break the four-hour mark.

He also takes an unscripted approach in his podcast Common Sense , which for two decades has served as his platform for thinking out loud about American political life — borrowing both its title and a measure of skepticism from Thomas Paine. It’s where he tries to be pragmatic about what American politics has become and how it got there.

Carlin is quick to note he’s no professional historian, but he is one of the nation’s most listened-to storytellers of history, one who’s built a career opting out of both mainstream media and political partisanship. And so we spoke to Carlin about the decades-long expansion of executive power, the two-party system, and the record-high number of Americans who identify as political independents.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Kmele Foster: We’re on the cusp of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and I think many people are wondering, is America coming or going? What is the state of this great experiment we set in motion? On an institutional level, Congress today doesn’t really legislate as it has historically. They barely even pass budgets anymore.

The three branches were designed to work together, or at least be counterbalancing forces. But the legislature isn’t doing nearly as much as it used to or was expected to, the executive branch is doing a heck of a lot more, and the courts are, it seems, still playing their traditional role — trying to adjudicate disputes over what can and can’t be done under the law by the legislative and executive branches. But it’s unclear whether the courts will continue to be able to play that role.

I’m curious about your thoughts on the extent to which this moment is unprecedented or a trend we’ve been on for a while, particularly regarding how executive power is being wielded.

Dan Carlin: What the current president is doing is not breaking down walls. He’s breaking down walls we pretended existed but didn’t — or haven’t for a long time. And this is what we were screaming about on our Common Sense show for years: If you don’t use these powers — for example, Congress’s authority to declare war — at what point do they go away?

I remember seeing it during the second Bush administration. They went to Congress for an authorization for the war in Iraq, but they would say, “We’re coming to you for this authorization, but we are saying explicitly that we don’t think we have to come to you for this authorization.” And Congress was cool with pretending they still needed to do this, but that’s a big fig leaf. Now, when the current president says, “I’m not even going to play that fake game,” and everybody’s in an uproar, what we’re doing is defending the fig leaf of protocol.

The thing to remember about executive power is that it’s tempting to exploit, not just for the executive, but for everyone who wants the same things as the executive. And it’s been a problem on both sides. When you’ve had a trend for decades and decades — some would say going back to Andrew Jackson — that’s going to be a bipartisan thing.

“The founders disliked ‘factions,’ which would have been their word for parties. The system we have now is not part of the design.”

Dan Carlin

To me, the biggest issue is that not enough people pay attention to the fact that the Constitution’s number one goal is not efficient legislating — it is preventing tyranny. We pay a huge price in this country for the inefficiencies in our constitutional design because it’s trying to keep those powers separate and prevent too much power from ending up in any one branch.

Now, the truth of the matter is, if you want to make progress on any number of issues, we’d be better off throwing that out the window. That tyranny-prevention stuff causes us all kinds of headaches, but you see how much it matters when we come close to really needing it.

The Trump administration, for example, would like to pass an agenda that people at the Heritage Foundation have, in one form or another, been pushing for 40 years. The last thing that they want to hear is that Congress needs to interfere more and reestablish guardrails. Liberals would have felt the same way during FDR’s administration when he was trying to pull people out of the Depression, but in ways that increase the tyranny potential, right?

In my view, the problem we have as a country is our inability to understand that we have a two-party system that has developed in a country whose founding documents didn’t design that at all. There’s nothing in the Constitution about Democrats. There’s nothing in there about Republicans. There’s nothing about Whigs. Nothing about Federalists.

The founders disliked “factions,” which would have been their word for parties. What we have now — and what has developed organically over 250 years — is not part of the design.

When you get on the radio and start talking about wanting third-party members or independents to run more, boy, you get a lesson in how hard that is because, over 250 years, the two parties have managed to give themselves something akin to an automatic berth in a basketball tournament. The Democrat and Republican automatically get in — somebody else has to really, really be extraordinary to make it in there.

And that’s wrong. We can’t get better anymore because if you don’t like the Trump administration, then your only alternative is to push the Chuck Schumer side of things.

Foster: What do you think the two-party system selects for?

Carlin: There was a book by Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig called Republic, Lost. What Lessig tries to point out is that both of our parties have, over time, become embedded in this system where what gets you promoted up political parties is fundraising.

The people who get to the top positions of power — these are not people who demonstrated fantastic leadership skills. They didn’t demonstrate the ability to work across the aisle. They didn’t demonstrate the ability to come up with really unique, groundbreaking, and interesting legislation. They were fundraisers.

So, when you look at the leadership now, and you say, “Well, why aren’t they pushing harder against the executive branch?” — most of them aren’t those kinds of people. They weren’t picked for those reasons. Those are not their strong points. They may have certain objectives, but they aren’t ideologues. You can see it because they often give up the opportunities to really push what they say they believe in for other things.

If these people really cared about the institution of Congress, or guardrails, or the Constitution, then you would never see the president able to go to war without Congress screaming and yelling. The fact that they don’t is a sign that they don’t want to, right? And they don’t want to because they’ve realized there’s no advantage for them.

“No one’s going to want the guardrails back up when their guy’s in power because it’s counterintuitive.”

Dan Carlin

The founders believed that the various ambitions of people in these different branches of government would counterbalance one another. My pride would counterbalance your pride. But somewhere down the road, people figured out, “I can have all of the perks that matter to me in this job without any of the things that are a pain in the rear for me in this job.” And when that happens, I think you start getting different people [running for office].

I can remember eras in legislative history where competent, experienced legislators left their jobs, saying, “I can’t operate in this environment anymore,” or “Congress has become too divided,” or “Fundraising is too much a part of my job.” Then you end up with people who aren’t leaving because it doesn’t bother them as much as it bothered their predecessor.

Foster: Do you see any realistic path to fixing that problem of incentives or restoring constitutional guardrails?

Carlin: Unless you’re somebody who says, “Elect me, and I’m going to put the guardrails back up,” I don’t know how we fix the fig-leaf-of-protocol problem. No one’s going to want the guardrails back up when their guy’s in power because it’s counterintuitive. If you say, “Elect me, and I’m going to give up some presidential power back to Congress, which may be run by the opposite party, by the way,” who’s going to elect you?

That’s what we get down this road. Can we make things better, or are things going to get worse? We’re required to do some pretty counterintuitive things as an electorate to make things better. Are we capable of doing that?

I don’t want to pretend that multi-party systems are an answer to the question. I think one reason Netanyahu in Israel is so extreme right now is because of the influence of minor parties. So there’s no panacea when it comes to multiple parties. But our duopoly in this country right now is messing with what my stepdad always said was part of the genius of America: We get better through competition. But we’ve got Hertz and Avis here, and there’s no incentive for anyone to be more than 1% better than the next guy. I think that maybe helps explain our political decline as a system.

Foster: Gallup recently found that a record high of 45% of U.S. adults now identify as political independents, yet political division only seems to be getting sharper. In terms of restoring constitutional guardrails or generally easing political polarization, do you see any solutions coming from outside the two-party setup?

Carlin: We’ve gone partisan crazy. The only advantage I can see in multiple parties is it would be harder to fall into one of these two camps.

You mentioned the rise in the number of people who call themselves political independents. I do believe that this is the highest number of political independents we’ve ever had in this country, at least registered, but we have no power. There is no political independent party, and we’re not united on anything. Whereas Democrats may argue amongst themselves, there’s enough agreement so that they’re in the same party. Same for Republicans. Independents span the spectrum from Libertarians to Greens.

We’re inherently divided from the get-go. So independents decide elections now, which I find fascinating, but we have no candidates. Do you see how crazy that is? What does a Trump or whoever’s running for the Democrats — what do they do? Do they appeal to their base, which they have to do, right? What did Nixon say? You run to the right for the primaries, and then you run back to the center for the generals. The Democrats run left for the primaries, then run to the center.

“We’re now at the brittle stage, where solving the problem could destroy the system.”

Dan Carlin

But why are they running to the center at all? Well, they’re running to the center to get people like me. But the radicalness of the times should reflect the level of the problems.

I always use a termite example. If you have somebody come and inspect your house, and they say you have termites, but you just got them, you have a lot of different options — it can cost you just a few bucks if you catch it early. If, however, you find out you’ve had them for 40 years, and they’ve screwed up the structure of your house, then your termite problem requires a radical solution.

By kicking the can down the road for generations like we have — whether we’re talking about race or economics or constitutional guardrails — you’re ignoring the termite problem. The solution that fixes the termite problem is going to have to be more and more structural as we go down the road. If we wanted to solve this problem back in the post-Nixon era, it would have been an easier solve. We’re now at the brittle stage, where solving the problem could be so radical that it could break and destroy the system we’re trying to solve.

We’re unable to figure out what the hell we do. And I think that’s where we see the dearth in leadership here, because we don’t have people running for office promising a solution, right?

Foster: They’re merely promising to keep you from the other guy.

Carlin: Yeah. You have to ask yourself, “Have we created something that breaks our system?” And the answer to that question is unknown. I feel like an observer more than an advocate. I used to know where things were going. I could talk about that intelligently. I feel like I’m just along for the ride now, like all of us are.

This article Dan Carlin: The two-party system was never the plan is featured on Big Think .

Full text

Here's an embarrassing thing to admit on the internet: when I was a teenage subscriber to Nintendo Power magazine, I picked the Donkey Kong 64 soundtrack as my "sign-up gift" because I wanted to be able to listen to the DK Rap on CD . Why I was obsessed with the song I can't say 25 years later, but Donkey Kong 64 is a memorable mess of a game—sprawling, ambitious, funny, inventive, and often infuriating, with a predilection for collectibles so infamous that the developers made fun of themselves for it a few years later.

The point is, Donkey Kong 64 is a game that inspires strong feelings in those who've played it. So it seems fitting that members of the DK64 randomizer community, who've dedicated years to picking it apart and putting it back together, would start developing an unofficial PC port with a specific rallying cry:

"Fuck AI vibe coding bullshit."

DK64 Recompiled, announced in a YouTube video in late June, is actually the second project with that exact name, and that's no coincidence. It's the latest example of an increasingly common point of friction in the game emulation and hacking scene, as experienced programmers butt heads with those eager to use new AI tools to spin up new ports of old games in record time. In some cases, ports written with AI tools like Claude are ostracized or ignored. But in the case of Donkey Kong 64, the game's biggest fans weren't about to cede ground.

"The DK64 randomizer dev team is owning this shit now," contributor 2dos wrote in the N64 Recomp Discord server, shortly after the video's debut. "We have decided to take on and own this development due to the poor development direction of another recompilation project of DK64 happening concurrently that is heavily leaning on AI vibe code, and thus is resulting in a poor quality project that will make it progressively harder to manage as time goes on. Our DK64 recompilation project is backed by folks who have worked on and tinkered with the backend of the DK64 code for well over a decade, and do not rely on vibe coding to make code changes."

Static recompilation is a technique that, in short, translates all of a game's code from one system's language to another; unlike emulation, it's not simulating the original hardware holistically. The most prominent hobby project using this technique so far is N64 Recomp, announced just over two years ago , which is a recompilation tool specifically geared towards Nintendo 64 games. Since its debut we've seen modders use it to create PC ports of Banjo-Kazooie , Star Fox 64, Mario Kart 64, and more, while similar projects have sprung up for other consoles like the Xbox 360.

Legally, the freshly written code is clean because these recompiled ports don't contain any of the assets from the original games—players have to provide a ROM file themselves. The porting process has become an ethical, rather than legal, battleground in the last few months, as "vibe coded" projects have begun cropping up practically every day.

One developer has used Claude's AI coding to spin up recompilation tools for the NES, Sega Genesis, PlayStation, Super Nintendo, Game Boy Advance, and Virtual Boy, each with a handful of games at least bootable so far. Another's got GitHub repositories for everything from the PS3 to the ZX Spectrum. Others have used the Xbox 360 recompilation framework ReXGlue to pump out ports at a seemingly astonishing rate—but once you get past the YouTube videos hyping them up, the reality isn't quite so impressive.

"Vibe coding a recomp has started to become significantly more prominent and not in a good way," says Ballaam, a contributor to the DK64 randomizer and now DK64 Recompiled alongside 2dos. "I think GoldenEye was released somewhat recently with being heavily vibe coded and, as a result of that (and probably either dev inexperience or overconfidence in the AI output), it leads to some very critical bugs which make the recomp borderline unplayable. The main N64 recomp server has gone as far as to not promote any recomp which uses AI for a significant portion of it."

(Image credit: Rare, Banjo Kazooie Recompiled) That GoldenEye project has also drawn criticism from those who know the game inside and out. The paradox of current tools making it easier than ever to start projects means anyone can vibe code their way to a partially working port, but shaping it into an accurate, crash-free, feature-rich version of a game is a different story.

2dos warns that a big risk with relying on AI is technical debt—a codebase becoming harder to understand and modify as it grows, with maintenance becoming "a nightmare" if you don't put in the work to thoroughly document it. The knock-on effect is that other humans are less likely to want (or even be able) to contribute. If a developer doesn't thoroughly understand the code the AI writes, that will also require them to spend more tokens to fix bugs. Those costs can add up fast, and the AI's "fixes" won't necessarily be good, either.

In the case of the AI-based Donkey Kong 64 recompilation, 2dos discovered that the agentic coding had modified RT64 , "the base module that makes the N64 graphics render."

"That would lead to significant management and compatibility issues down the line, and cause other unexpected side effects that are currently visible in preview videos in the other recomp," he says.

Vibes: Questionable

Using AI is attractive because it skips past the slow, manual process of figuring out exactly what every function in a game is doing, which can often take years. Many of the polished recompilation ports available currently are for games that have previously been decompiled , creating fresh, human-readable source code. It's an enormous undertaking even for old games, but understanding what the source code is doing helps enormously when troubleshooting.

Decompilation also makes modding much more viable, which is one of the most attractive features for modern ports of retro games. (DK64: Recompiled's debut trailer touts support for a tag anywhere mod that will let players swap between Kongs on the fly, addressing one of the most common complaints about the game's backtrack-heavy design.)

Developer SrBananaMan64 recently released a PC port of Harvest Moon 64 alongside a range of mods to speed up messages, zoom out the camera, and so on. A completed decompilation by another developer helped make that a reality.

"They're using a powerful tool without putting in the work to actually learn what it does"

ReXGlue developer

"Recompilation doesn’t actually need a 100% decomp to work, just enough for the symbols to be mapped out to produce a viable .elf file that N64Recomp uses," SrBananaMan64 says. "But this game seemed like it needed the proper enhancements to spruce [it] up… The quality of the game is lacking so it needs the widescreen and high frame rates to compensate for that in my opinion."

He shares the DK team's view that developers "should never let AI take the wheel," even if it can occasionally be an "amazing tool" for specific uses. "Minuscule tasks such as searching through a decomp for a certain function you would like to patch or mod," for example.

Lines for acceptable AI usage are now being drawn across the open source development scene. The maintainers of the Godot engine are now rejecting "substantial pieces" of AI-generated code . A nascent recompilation project for the GameCube & Wii declares "No AI code is used," and that it's a "human hand-made project by a group of passionate developers, who want the best for the Retro Gaming community." So does a solo project tackling recompilation for the PS1 .

An in-progress recompilation of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night via RecompOne (Image credit: RecompOne, Konami) A port for Sonic Advance also has a "strict no AI policy," championing the endeavor's underlying purpose: "We want humans to use this project to practice their skills. Reverse engineering, documenting, understanding, being part of the process."

Tom, the developer behind ReXGlue, sees the low-effort ports as a "people problem," not an issue with the tool itself. "The real issue is people who don't bother to understand what they're posting," he says. "They're using a powerful tool without putting in the work to actually learn what it does, and then wondering why their project falls apart, performs poorly, or has nothing genuinely new to bring to the table. It's like riding a motorcycle before you can even ride a bike."

One common defense for vibe coding ports boil down to "this is just my hobby project, so ignore it if you don't like it." One counter-argument to that point is ethical. Even setting aside the broader environmental impact and stolen training data of generative AI models, there's an argument that even a fan-made port should endeavor to do justice to the original work—to honor the game's original creators by representing it as accuracy as possible. Another is that a vibe coded port that's likely to have those long-term maintenance issues 2dos warned about could pull interest away from a human-coded project that's more likely to be perfected in the long run. The existence of a half-assed project could even turn another developer away from putting months or years of their work into a game at all.

"That’s a big risk," SrBananaMan64 says. For example the Smash Bros. Battleship project which was completely AI generated will take away from the release of mine." (He's currently working on his own recompilation of the N64 fighter).

Another common defense from those simply eager to play a game they love—that anything is better than nothing—also doesn't necessarily hold up beyond the initial burst of excitement.

(Image credit: Nintendo, DK64: Recompiled) "I think there is some sentiment from those who haven't experienced a vibe coded recomp that 'who cares if its vibe coded as long as it works," says Ballaam, "when they don't fully realize that for the most part, they really really don't.

"LLMs nowadays have lowered the skill floor of producing a functioning piece of code that those who are technologically curious but don't have the patience or passion to fully learn a language can feel like they're coding. They scale up their projects but don't scale up their learning to accommodate their desires because they rely too much on the AI crutch."

Perhaps someday, as agentic coding continues to advance, vibe coded ports really will be sufficient. Perhaps a small portion of this initial wave of vibe coders will even pick up enough interest in the process to learn to do the programming themselves. Or maybe the rising costs of AI models will dissuade casual hobbyists from burning tokens on projects that are hard to see through to completion.

For now we're in the thick of it, and we're sure to see more competing projects like Donkey Kong 64 Recompiled before we come out the other side.

Full text

Shielding astronauts from the killer radiation they face is a central challenge facing any designer of a deep-space crewed mission. Even relatively low levels of exposure for long periods of time can lead to everything from central nervous system damage to cancer. But current solutions, such as passive water shells or active superconducting magnets, have their own limitations. To get around those, a new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv by Valerio Parisi and a team of researchers from Italy and Germany, looks at the feasibility of using a permanent magnet (and its associated permanent magnetic field) to potentially block some of that deadly radiation without the costs of competing technologies.

Full text

My dad called it a “Spanish omelette.” In reality, it was an excuse to clean out the fridge. Anything not-quite-rotting was fair game. Throw it in. To be fair, they were mostly delicious, but a generous flood of ketchup can hide a lot of things.

Every Saturday morning, as he whisked up our eggs, my dad would listen to Any Questions? , a weekly BBC Radio 4 panel show where host Jonathan Dimbleby asked politicians, business leaders, and the occasional celebrity questions from the audience: “In light of the recent intervention in Iraq, do the panel think we need to double down or withdraw our commitment to NATO?” So little changes.

As Dimbleby tried to referee the point-scoring and playground screeching, my dad would invariably chime in.

“Oh, he’s a bloody arsehole,” he’d grumble. Stir the onions. “The last government tried that and look how it turned out!” In go the crusty green olives. “Yeah, but of course she would say that, wouldn’t she?!” A garnish of wilted rocket.

As much as we might hate the idea, many of our values are inherited rather than consciously chosen.

I didn’t know it, of course, but as I ate my Spanish omelettes, I was digesting my dad’s ideas. His gripes became my gripes. His loyalties became my loyalties.

As much as we might hate the idea, many of our values are inherited rather than consciously chosen. Our beliefs — especially in our younger years — are a response to our primary caregivers’ beliefs. And so, “He’s an arsehole” ran through my head as I cast my first vote.

The world is a collection of individuals, and what is true for the molded youth is true for society. How we collectively think starts out as a reaction to the way our forefathers thought. We inherit the beliefs we learn to question.

In 1929, the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote that the history of Western philosophy is “a series of footnotes to Plato.” Plato set the rules of the game. He threw down the first philosophical gauntlet and challenged his toga-clad friends to a wrestling match: “The world is divided into spirit and body! FIGHT ME!”

Platonism birthed Aristotelianism, which birthed the “eudaimonic schools” such as Stoicism and Epicureanism. Scholasticism led to Rationalism. On it goes, in an overly simplistic but broadly true progression of thought.

It wasn’t until my 30s that I properly felt I had stepped out from the shadow of my dad’s Saturday rants, and it’s often not until quite later that a nation steps out of the shadow of its founding fathers. So, when did America step out from the shadow of its European birthplace? When did a distinctly American philosophy start to emerge?

Before the end of the 18th century, two major figures came to define America’s zeitgeist.

While there is no such thing as a perfectly “pure” nation-state marching in the uniform of a cultural monotone, the U.S. is truly a Spanish omelette of a country. It feels appropriate, then, that the earliest philosophy courses taught in America were just as hodgepodge, with formal establishments like Yale, Harvard, and William & Mary home to a kind of intellectual bricolage.

Teachers of philosophy, in general, can be reluctant to “identify [themselves] wholly with a particular philosopher or philosophical school,” writes historian Norman Fiering, but colonial thinkers were particularly so — fearful that they might discard ideas that “the light of history” would prove were worthy of consideration, they taught everything. Fiering attributes this to a lack of confidence caused by “the pervasive sense of intellectual inferiority that came with provincial status.”

Among all the ideas they were teaching, none came from what could be considered American philosophers. Like young Jonny voting for the first time, the earliest American thinkers still had the voices of their intellectual forefathers in their heads. At this point in the nation’s history, they were merely “tinkering with received ideas from overseas and looking forward to the day when various institutions — social, economic, educational — would exist here in sufficient strength to sustain independent work,” writes Fiering.

It’s hard to identify when the first strands of “American philosophy” emerge, but it’s easier to identify uniquely American philosophers. Before the end of the 18th century, two major figures came to define the nation’s zeitgeist: Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin.

American culture celebrates the self-taught hustler and the side-door entrant.

I feel a great affinity with Edwards and Franklin — a strange thing to hear from someone schooled in the British university system — because I never enrolled in a postgraduate philosophy program. I do not have a PhD. In some European circles, that’s a badge of shame. “Dr. Thomson” would open doors — often centuries-old and bolted with medieval iron — that “Mr. Thomson” cannot. And yet, here I am as the “lead philosopher” of Big Think, writing for a successful and prestigious American company. It doesn’t matter that I don’t have a 50,000-word thesis on late Wittgenstein on my bookshelf. It matters that I can write about philosophy well and get it (mostly) right.

This is for good reason. American culture celebrates the self-taught hustler and the side-door entrant, from the self-made men of the early republic to the college-dropout CEOs of Silicon Valley, and the two dominant figures in 18th-century American philosophy lived, wrote, and excelled outside of formal academia.

Edwards went to Yale but did his most famous philosophical work outside its gates. He was the great theologian-philosopher of British colonial America and the leading voice of the “First Great Awakening.” Working from a pulpit in Massachusetts, he wrote treatises on free will and original sin. He argued that true virtue was not mere kindness or civic decency but a kind of cosmic affection that reached beyond family, tribe, or nation. He sought to marry the clockwork universe of Newton’s Principia with the inward fire of Puritan conviction, and the result was a theology that was as rigorous as it was strange.

Even Edwards is dwarfed by the titan that is Franklin. Called “the first philosopher” of America by David Hume , a leading philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment, Franklin was born to a family that was too poor to send him to school past the age of 10, and so he retained a kind of frosty ambivalence towards the collegians dominating New England high society. Yet he wrote beautifully, with incredible wit, and covered a range of deep, philosophical issues, approaching them from a position of practicality and experimentation — setting him apart from the more abstract European philosophers of his time.

Nature is transcendentalism’s scripture, solitude is its method, and self-reliance is its golden rule.

By 1830, the U.S. had developed the idea of the power of the individual over institutions — as exemplified by men like Franklin — into its first full-blown philosophical movement: transcendentalism.

If the U.S. is the opt-out nation, transcendentalism is the opt-out philosophy. It espouses a belief that each individual carries within them a direct line to a spiritual, unifying truth. They don’t need the mediation of a church, government, or system of philosophy to encounter the divine. Nature is transcendentalism’s scripture, solitude is its method, and self-reliance is its golden rule. Henry David Thoreau — a father of transcendentalism, along with Ralph Waldo Emerson — took the idea to its extremes, leaving behind society for the solitude of Walden Pond.

“The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature — of sun and wind and rain, of summer and winter — such health, such cheer, they afford forever! … Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?” Thoreau writes in Walden .

Just as I eventually broke free from my father’s political beliefs to develop my own, new philosophies eventually branched off from transcendentalism. Still, as Whitehead pointed out, each new idea is in response to those that came before it — continuing a tradition that dates back to Plato.

And, on a more personal level, to some very questionable Saturday-morning breakfasts.

This article “Live deliberately”: The origin of America’s first philosophy is featured on Big Think .

Full text

The goal of the TechRadar Choice Awards has always been to celebrate the most-loved tech releases by enabling the real-world users of the products to combine their experience with our editors' expertise to choose our winners.

It’s time to take this idea further: in 2026, we’re running two sets of awards back to back: meet the TechRadar Readers’ Choice Awards, and the TechRadar Product of the Year Awards. Combined, these are the TechRadar Awards 2026 .

They both have the same core categories, covering all the products we love to test and explore on TechRadar, ranging from TVs to tablets, drones to DACs, coffee machines to console accessories.

However, the winners of the TechRadar Readers’ Choice Awards will be chosen 100% by public vote, while the winners of the TechRadar Product of the Year Awards will be chosen 100% by our editors and reviewers.

The shortlists of products that readers will vote on in the TechRadar Readers’ Choice Awards will be chosen by the TechRadar team, selected from the most popular and highest-rated products released during the eligibility period (meaning they must be released between 1st September 2025 and 31st September 2026 in most cases).

• Read the full eligibility criteria for the TechRadar Awards 2026

To give the brands and products you represent (or that you just love) the best chance to appear in the shortlists, you can nominate them for these awards, starting 7 July 2026. Whether you work with the product you're nominating, or are just a fan, give it your support!

• Nominate products for the TechRadar Awards 2026

The winners will be announced in October — make sure your favorite products are in with a chance by nominating them!