Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present – 500 Years of Western Cultural Life. It gave me a framework for how to absorb and interpret the current political strife and feeling that things might be imploding. “They are!” argued Barzun in 2000. His argument is that individualism, upon which we base our society, has become decadent and is falling off.

Ricardo Nuila’s Q&A: “I need to be nicer to my family”