Sharing the culture you love—a beloved song, that book that changed your life—can help translate your inner world to the people you love. Or it might make you look really strange.

The wind brings the circus
to a lonesome town upstate,
and puffins to the Isle of May,
   seagirt, desolate.
The wind brings spectators
by ferry to the docks.
Side by side like gravy boats
   seals loll on the rocks.
The throng swipes their shoes
on a disinfectant mat,
running down the gangplank
   to the puffins’ habitat.
The main ring is the breeding ground
where lies their single egg
circled with a constant cry
   echoed off the crag.

Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, has often said that AI will cure most diseases in the next 10 years. Late last month, he claimed that his company had taken a first step toward that future: Claude had, in less than 24 hours, discovered a new “enzyme system” that the company says resembles CRISPR, a gene-editing tool currently curing people of diseases.

Not so long ago, heroic public statuary felt irrelevant—good for locating yourself in traffic circles but otherwise dismissed as a relic of some credulous, great-man-besotted past. The fact that places like Pyongyang and Ashgabat still went in for it just confirmed the association with autocratic backwardness and childish megalomania.
Things have changed. In Washington, D.C.

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Long before he became famous as the author of The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt was a social psychologist whose work revolutionized the field. In this episode of The Permanent Questions, taped in front of a live audience at last month’s Atlantic Festival, David Brooks talks with Haidt about his biggest lessons from 40 years of studying human nature.