I want to start with a word that everyone uses and almost no one defines. "True." When somebody tells you something is true, what are they actually saying? When you say something is true, what do you mean?

Before anything else, before the world and before the question of how to live in it, I had to know what I could trust.

Most of what is wrong with the human world, I have come to think, starts in one place. We are trying to be happy in a way the world will not allow. We chase pleasures that do not last. We take more than we need. We act as if the planet is a buffet that will be refilled in the morning, and we are surprised, every year, when something else has run out. The forests are smaller. The rivers are dirtier. The air carries the news of what we have done. None of this is hidden. We just