What We Are Reading Today: A Thousand Small Sanities

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Updated 20 September 2021
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What We Are Reading Today: A Thousand Small Sanities

Author: Adam Gopnik

A stirring defense of liberalism against the dogmatisms of our time from an award-winning and New York Times bestselling author.
Not since the early twentieth century has liberalism, and liberals, been under such relentless attack, from both right and left. The crisis of democracy in our era has produced a crisis of faith in liberal institutions and, even worse, in liberal thought.
A Thousand Small Sanities is a manifesto rooted in the lives of people who invented and extended the liberal tradition, according to a review on goodreads.com. Taking us from Montaigne to Mill, and from Middlemarch to the civil rights movement, Adam Gopnik argues that liberalism is not a form of centrism, nor simply another word for free markets, nor merely a term denoting a set of rights.
It is something far more ambitious: The search for radical change by humane measures. Gopnik shows us why liberalism is one of the great moral adventures in human history — and why, in an age of autocracy, our lives may depend on its continuation.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Disease of Boredom’ by Josefa Ros Velasco

Updated 01 February 2026
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Disease of Boredom’ by Josefa Ros Velasco

Boredom visits all of us at some point. Sometimes it is fleeting. Other times it is deep, lasting, or profound. We even experience it in groups.

Boredom can be so intolerable that some are willing to do almost anything just to escape it. In this provocative and eloquently argued book, Josefa Ros Velasco invites us to listen to the voice of boredom, explore the reasons behind it, and allow it to guide our actions and return us to a place of satisfaction.

She shows how boredom is a phenomenon that torments us when reality does not meet our expectations.