Sigmund Freud thought that becoming a functioning adult had much to do with our ability to adjust to the "reality principle," the way the external world of people and things presses back against our will and limits the attainment of our desires. And in his book, The World Beyond Your Head: Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction, Matthew Crawford argues that, in a world dominated by technology, activity on screens and interaction through social media increasingly substitute for encounters with the real world around us.

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In her book The White Album (Simon & Schuster, 1979), Joan Didion writes that "the Sixties ended... at the exact moment when word" of the Manson murders circulated. In his current film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which has just become the second best-selling of his career, Quentin Tarantino recreates the Hollywood of that summer, particularly of the days leading up to the murders.

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Thirty years ago this summer, Seinfeld hit the airwaves with two rules, or anti-rules really, for its writers: no hugs and no learning. These rules turned inside out the tenets of the classic American sitcom, which were always about hugs and, more or less overtly, about learning.

A show seemingly about everything, from Keith Hernandez to Snapple, Seinfeld is in an important sense a show about nothing, as the tagline from the episode "The Pilot" makes explicit. It is a show about characters whose lives lack any fundamental point or meaning: no real connection to others (no hugs) and no direction whatsoever (no learning).

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In recent months, as I prepared to join the University of Dallas as its new president, my wife, Stacey, and I had the pleasure of meeting many students. During one reception, something struck me. Students almost never approached us individually; instead they came in groups, groups of friends spanning different majors and experiences: English majors with physics majors; art history majors with business majors; athletes with nonathletes, a Muslim student with her Catholic friends, and on and on.

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The 17th century mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal once remarked, "The truth is so obscured these days that only those who love it will find it." Living at the advent of modernity, characterized by great ideological contests among and within philosophy, religion, science and politics, Pascal was perhaps more aware than any of his contemporaries of two facts about human beings. First, the need for truth is woven into the deepest impulses of our being. Second, we are prone, consciously and unconsciously, to exercise great energy to avoid truths we don't want to face.

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