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The 16th century in Europe was a great century of change. The humanists and artists of the Renaissance would help characterize the age as one of individualism and self-creativity. Humanists such as Petrarch helped restore the dignity of mankind while men like Machiavelli injected humanism into politics. When all is said and done, the Renaissance helped to secularize European society.

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 As democratic nation-states reorient themselves to being accountable to global financial markets, non-democratic bodies such as the World Trade Organization, and trade agreements such as General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and Trade in Services Agreement, they will necessarily become less responsive to the aspirations of their own citizens. With overt repression not always the most felicitous or cost-effective policy option, it has become imperative to find ways and means to ideologically tame the economically excluded. This is critical because growing discontent could lead to political instability.

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The real threat from ISIS is not territorial but ideological. Fighters are flocking to the fledgling caliphate because they are attracted to the notion that violence and bloodshed can create a space of totalitarian homogeneity. It’s not simply the attraction of a particular religious interpretation. ISIS offers a counter-narrative to nationalism and the emptiness of godless globalization. The society that the caliphate has created is multi-ethnic, transnational, and fully conversant in the latest technology.

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 The notion of giving offense suggests that certain beliefs are so important or valuable to certain people that they should be put beyond the possibility of being insulted, caricatured, or even questioned. The importance of the principle of free speech is precisely that it provides a challenge to the idea that some questions are beyond contention, and thus acts as a challenge to authority. Once we give up on the right to offend in the name of tolerance or respect. We constrain our ability to challenge those in power, and therefore to challenge injustice.

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The East India Company no longer exists, and it has, thankfully, no exact modern equivalent. Walmart, which is the world’s largest corporation in revenue terms, does not number among its assets a fleet of nuclear submarines; neither Facebook nor Shell possesses regiments of infantry. Yet the East India Company – the first great multinational corporation, and the first to run amok – was the ultimate model for many of today’s joint-stock corporations. The most powerful among them do not need their own armies: they can rely on governments to protect their interests and bail them out. The East India Company remains history’s most terrifying warning about the potential for the abuse of corporate power – and the insidious means by which the interests of shareholders become those of the state. Three hundred and fifteen years after its founding, its story has never been more current.

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 The only guarantee we have of taste is that it will change. In response to novelty, even as the resistance to the unfamiliar reaches a threshold, fluency begets liking. Consider the case of the Sydney Opera House. A few decades ago, the now widely cherished building was the center of a national scandal. Not only did the building not fit the traditional form of an opera house; it did not fit the traditional form of a building. No one thought an opera house could look like the Sydney Opera House until architect Jorn Utzon, taking his idea from a peeled orange, said it could. Utzon changed the idea of what one could ask for in the building, projecting future tastes no one knew they had.

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Behavioral geneticists have found that the effects of being brought up in a given family are sometimes detectable in childhood, but that they tend to peter out by the time the child has grown up. That is, the reach of the genes appears to get stronger as we age, not weaker. Perhaps our genes affect our environments, which in turn affect ourselves. Young children are at the mercy of parents and have to adapt to a world that is not of their choosing. As they get older, however, they can gravitate to the micro-environments that best suit their natures. Whatever genetic quirks incline a youth towards one niche or another will be magnified over time as they develop the parts of themselves that allow them to flourish in their chosen worlds.

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The Indians got to zero in two stages. First they overcame the problem of denoting empty spaces in place-value notation by drawing a circle around the space where there was a "missing" entry. This much the Babylonians had done. The circle gave rise to the present-day symbol 0 for zero. The second step was to regard that extra symbol just like the other nine. This meant developing the rules for doing arithmetic using this additional symbol along with all the others. This second step – changing the underlying conception so that the rules of arithmetic operated not on the numbers themselves but on symbols for the numbers – was the key.

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 The true essence of a writer’s voice lies far beneath the surface. It is not merely a matter of grammar and word choice. It is the writer's craving to connect. It is less craft and more courage – less ink and more blood. It is not only how the writer tells his story; it is the story he chooses tell. The story he must tell. It is the reason he writes.