I used to subscribe wholeheartedly to the idea that it’s better to know a little about a lot than a lot about a little.

That was hard-wired into my epistemological worldview nearly two decades ago by a political theorist I met at one of America’s larger public universities.

A gifted lecturer, he used to grouse good-naturedly about his colleagues’ “physics envy,” by which he meant the multi-decade quest to operationalize political science, economics, sociology and psychology such that they might emulate the predictive power of the physical sciences.

To him, the notion that “soft” sciences can be refined, reformed and forged in the image of physics through iterative metricizing and tortured mathematicalization was comically quixotic, inherently futile and, worse, risked sterilizing the disciplines in the name of claiming for them a kind of rigor not well-suited for inquiry into the vagaries of human behavior.

Rigor isn’t the only path to prestige. Even if it were, rigor can mean different things in different analytical contexts. Besides, there’s plenty about the natural world that modern physics can’t explain. As it turns out, even the most fundamental of the natural sciences suffers from the so-called “illusion of precision.”

Attempts to operationalize political science very often result in comedically obscure research agendas, which in turn mint credentialed “experts” whose expertise admits of virtually no practical application whatever.

Of what real-world value, to use a stylized example, is a PhD awarded on the basis of a complicated modeling exercise which, according to a torturously-argued dissertation, successfully predicts the composition of legislative coalitions by way of regressing voter bloc shifts on local crop yields in a frontier democracy?

With apologies to frontier democracies, the answer’s “very little.” And a political science department full of such experts — PhDs awarded for excellence in esoterica — isn’t, in my experience, greater than the sum of its parts.

Even 15 years ago, generalists and theoreticians were an endangered species in political science graduate programs outside of the Ivy League. They may be extinct now. If they are, it’s a shame.

I thought about all of that while relaxing in the lounge area of Columbia, South Carolina’s newest boutique hotel, The Lantern. A renovated firehouse that sits just across the street from campus, the lobby’s open-concept. And open-air. The checkin desk, a cafe, a restaurant and a bar all share the old engine bay. The exterior walls slide open, letting the outside completely in, a gimmick that’ll prove unsustainably expensive during sweltering South Carolina summers.

I had dinner reservations at what was supposed to be the city’s best restaurant — Motor Supply Co. Bistro — at 5:30. I was checked in and settled by 3:15 or so, and Motor Supply’s just around the corner from the hotel, so I had two hours to kill.

Columbia’s not much to see, and what there is to see I’d see on my morning run the next day, so rather than wander around an empty campus, I settled into the corner of one of the lounge sofas and set about finishing Marcus Willaschek’s “Kant: A Revolution In Thinking.”

Billed as an introduction to the writing and thought of Immanuel Kant, arguably the brightest mind our species ever produced, Willaschek’s 2025 primer is as accessible as the material with which it’s concerned. So, not very in some places.

But Willaschek, himself a philosopher of more than a little renown and among the world’s foremost experts on Kant, largely makes good on the promise implicit in the book’s billing — namely to avoid becoming tedious. That’s no small feat in any serious survey of Kant’s thought. Willaschek accomplishes it in part by incorporating enough details of Kant’s personal life to make the book part biography.

Indeed, “A Revolution In Thinking” is (almost and thankfully) as much a “life and times” of Kant as it is another in a series of attempts to summarize and condense the life’s work of the greatest post-antiquity philosopher.

Kant could be an easy enough read when he wanted to be, but for the layperson, his major works feel borderline impenetrable, particularly if you read them without the benefit of a primer, as I did when I was an undergraduate many moons ago.

As is the case with any writer, no matter how initially difficult, the more Kant you read, the easier he gets, if for no other reason than you learn his cadence. Or, more aptly if you’re not multilingual, you learn what you can about his cadence from your preferred translator. Once you have the rhythmic context — his poetic meter, so to speak — Kant’s systematic, procedural style feels quite lucid, certainly compared to someone like Nietzsche or Aristotle.

If you’re familiar with his subject’s most famous work, you won’t likely come away from Willaschek’s survey with any fresh revelations about Kant the “all-crushing” polemicist. But you’ll have a much better sense of Kant the man, even if you knew a little about his personal life before.

What struck me most was the extent to which Kant — a man who spent his life delving as deeply as any human’s ever ventured into topics which, in my experience, are conducive to depression, nihilism and even pervasive, existential dread — not only avoided all three, but retained faith in humans’ capacity for moral betterment, managing even to formulate and crystalize normative maxims to that end.

In short, the modern stereotype of an exacting, severe rationalist with a pedant’s penchant for analytical rigor and an almost inescapable tendency toward stern solemnity isn’t a perfect, or even a good, fit for Kant the man. Except, probably, for the “exacting” part.

Indeed, one of Kant’s most famous intellectual contributions was the creation of a middle ground between rationalism and empiricism. More to the biographical point, Kant was a public figure of some celebrity, a professional lecturer and, at least until middle age, a sharply dressed socialite whose student-turned-bitter intellectual rival Johann Gottfried Herder once described as “the most urbane fellow in the world.”

While Kant eventually withdrew from the Königsberg party scene, regulars at his famous luncheons would attest that he was at least as gifted a conversationalist as he was anything else. That too clashes with the modern caricature of Kant as a ruminative recluse.

“Am I a polymath?” I wondered aloud, tucking Willaschek and Kant away in my shoulder bag and hoisting myself up for the five-minute stroll to the restaurant. The young professional opposite me on another couch looked up from his MacBook.

On the Merriam-Webster definition — “A person of encyclopedic learning” — it’s probably an absurd question when applied to me. But on what, to my mind anyway, is a much better definition — “An individual whose knowledge and expertise span a diverse and significant number of subject areas” — it probably fits, as long as we don’t push the envelope too far on “expertise,” which would anyway beg the question.

I’d never entertain the idea of myself as a polymath on par with Kant. I haven’t, for example, published treatises which forever changed the way we think about topics as self-evidently foundational as morality, aesthetics and epistemology, nor have I lectured professionally on everything from metaphysics to ethics to geology.

But setting aside how low I’d surely rank on a list of historical polymaths, accepting that a polymath’s someone who, given the choice between knowing a little about a lot or a lot about a little, would choose the former and considering my view that it’s actually impossible, even for a mind like Kant’s, to truly know “a lot” about “all” things, I suspect I might meet a loose definition.

The problem, for me anyway, is that the more generalized knowledge I attain about the world, the less happy (contented, fulfilled and so on) I seem to be.

If the political theorist I met all those years ago was correct to suggest that by awarding PhDs almost solely on the basis of niche expertise, the social sciences are minting legions of monomaths, I’m beginning to suspect I’d be happier today if I’d made a career of predicting parliamentary voter bloc shifts from local rainfall levels. He was far too charitable to put it this way, but a monomath’s a kind of idiot. And ignorance is famously bliss.

“But if Kant, history’s most celebrated polymath, could be contented and sociable — or at least not depressed and antisocial — why can’t I be similarly fulfilled?” I wondered, this time in my head, aware again that I was in public.

I checked myself in the mirrored glass above a two-way fireplace in the hotel lounge. I liked my wardrobe choice, but my vanity lamented the long odds of anyone noticing, let alone appreciating, the pairings: A light grey, distressed sweater from SAINT Mxxxxxx (the niche street wear brand also known as Saint Michael) featuring a charcoal-colored print of a rose bouquet under a jet black John Elliott denim jacket with dark grey Levis and a tasteful YSL Cassandre belt. (Wild Saint with staid Saint, understated luxury denim with unpretentious working man’s denim.)

I strode out the… well, out the wall of the hotel lobby and took a right on Park Street. As I walked to dinner, it occurred to me that Kant would likely be sympathetic to modern efforts aimed at formalizing the social sciences, at least to a point, systematic rigor being his stylistic calling card.

And yet, he’d surely frown upon, or even outright reject, the notion that human affairs are reducible to deterministic “laws.” There’s a lot of friction between determinism and free will, and if we’re going to insist on holding others accountable for their words and deeds, we have to presuppose they had a choice. “Ought implies can,” as Kant put it.

I could’ve — and, as it turns out, ought‘ve — taken the advice of the hotel bartender, a 20-year veteran of the local food scene, and skipped Motor Supply in favor of The Dragon Room, which immodestly bills itself as a “must-visit” for anyone dining out in Columbia.

Whatever it used to be, or might still be on better nights, Motor Supply was underwhelming to the point of meriting almost no comment. I politely left following a pitiable attempt at a homemade pappardelle served submersed in an unforgivably thin pomodoro cream sauce. Sugar snap peas, mushrooms and zucchini were lifeless in a pink watery grave.

My first instinct upon leaving was to hover around the bar at Di Vino Rosso and wait for a seat to open up. A true white tablecloth complete with a corner pianist, I could be confident there that what remained of my appetite wouldn’t be squandered — that the first evening of a two-day culinary tour wouldn’t be wasted entirely. But the place was teeming. The wait, the two hostesses said, would very likely be a long one.

“I understand,” I told them, “but I’ve already had one bad food experience tonight, so I need to be sure the next one’s great.” “Have you tried next door?” one of them asked. “What’s next door?” “Dragon Room.” “No. It’s good?” They looked at each other and nodded enthusiastically. “We eat there,” the other one said. “We all do.”

It wasn’t clear who she meant by “we all,” but it was the second time in the space of four hours that a local urged me to chase the dragon. I figured I should take a hint. “Ok, I’ll know who to blame if it’s no good,” I told them, only half-joking.

Despite ample seating, The Dragon Room does feel like a “room.” And notwithstanding you actually have to go up a few stairs to reach the front door, the ambiance is atmospherically consistent with an opium den, which works well with the official pitch: The Dragon Room promises “a sanctuary for culinary escapism.”

I was greeted at the bar by a very early thirtysomething. Heavily-tatted and pierced, she fit the role so perfectly I worried she might’ve been typecast by management for the part. The part of an opium den attendant, I mean. An alluring sherpa for your “escapist” adventures.

I gave her the same spiel as the hostesses at Di Vino Rosso, only stripped of the euphemistic language to describe my experience at Motor Supply. “That place was awful,” I told her. “Your task is to redeem Columbia’s culinary reputation. You up for it?”

That’s the sort of thing that went a long way with bartenders a decade ago. These days, it comes across as off-putting or anyway demanding — a self-important 42-year-old who inexplicably thinks he’s owed a dining experience above and beyond what everyone else is entitled to simply by walking in the door.

She was gracious from the beginning. “We’ll give it our best,” she said, with a smile that conveyed something like sympathetic amenability to a routine worn thin by time and a shtick she recognized as approaching the end of its useful life.

As I looked over the menu, my brow furrowed at the prices. Not because they were high. The opposite. I’m all too familiar with the fact that $5 street food cooked in a dirty fryer can be the best thing you’ve ever eaten, but I’m instinctually skeptical of the notion that restaurant small plates priced below $20 and entrees below $40 can be anything better than edible.

I pulled out my phone and read the rest of The Dragon Room’s manifesto from their website. These $12 starters and $16 mains, I’m to believe, are a “love letter to the East Asian pantry” crafted by a kitchen that’s “spent years obsessing over fundamental techniques.”

“We take the dishes you know by heart and rebuild them,” the pitch declared, boldly. I took a sip of my coffee and read on. “This isn’t fusion. This is an obsession.” My throat, trying to suppress an open laugh, pushed coffee up into my nose. I coughed, and rather loudly.

“You ok?” she called out, from the end of the bar, where she was eyes down in an iPhone. “Yeah, fine. I think I’m ready to order.” Resigned already to another subpar experience, I did what one does in that scenario: I chose a handful of things from each section of the menu and let the bartender decide which of them I should have. It’s a fatalistic maneuver that says, without saying it, “Just feed me what you eat here.”

My arrogant presumptuousness leads me astray at regular intervals, but typically not when it comes to restaurants. The Dragon Room was the exception. I can’t remember a dining experience when my intuitions were as wrong as they were on the evening of June 3, 2026.

The first dish, chicken-filled dumplings in a lemongrass coconut broth, shouldn’t have been remarkable. I dare say there’s no flavor profile more ubiquitous in Southeast Asian fare than lemongrass with coconut.

The Dragon Room describes its menu as “respectfully inauthentic” by way of the kitchen’s inclination to “break the rules of how ingredients in the East Asian pantry are supposed to be used.” You’re hardly breaking rules by pairing lemongrass with coconut milk. The opposite, actually: You’re adhering to them. Lemongrass with coconut is obligatory.

And yet, you could scarcely ask more from the mandatory than what The Dragon Room delivered with a broth that was every bit as aromatic and lavishly supple as it had to be, and then some. A chili oil drizzle kept things lively.

“That was an auspicious start,” I told the bartender, fully expecting her to do what most people do when confronted with the word “auspicious”: Apologize, assuming it’s a derisive term. “Awesome,” she said instead. This, apparently, was someone with at least half a vocabulary.

Next up was bluefin tuna marinated in ponzu with rice and masago all stuffed in a nori “taco” shell. The scare quotes around “taco” were printed on the menu, a nod to the ostensible novelty of the idea. It again struck me that The Dragon Room might be falling short of the tenets espoused in its “manifesto,” which tells diners to “leave the rules at the door” and prepare for dishes crafted with “aggressive intentionality.”

There’s nothing even remotely novel about a sushi “taco.” Nori as a taco shell’s about as “aggressively” innovative as putting avocado on bread instead of butter. But for the second straight dish, the disparity between The Dragon Room’s pretensions to culinary cleverness and the inventiveness on display in the actual dishes, took a backseat to what really counts: Flavor.

The tuna was good, the rest good enough and the bartender’s entreaty that I “stop worrying about how I look and just eat the whole thing in two bites,” proved sage counsel. I glanced down at my sweater, fearing the taco — sorry, “taco” — might’ve dropped something onto Saint Michael’s roses. They were unscathed.

“What’s your story?” I asked the bartender, as I waited on the main. “Well, I was born in Bluffton –” I cut her off immediately. “No way! I know Bluffton well. I’ve spent about a fourth of my life on Hilton Head,” I told her. We talked about that for a minute or two, then she told me she had a degree in English literature from Clemson and was working on an MFA at USC before she took some time off.

I asked about her favorite writers and poets, and she gave respectable enough answers. “So you’re an actually interesting person, then?” I wondered, jokingly, as if anyone would cop to being uninteresting. She got the joke. “I like to think so,” she said.

Then came the main: “Got Dam noodles,” udon in a macadamia-miso butter with caramelized onions, sweet peppers and broccoli. The presentation was a bit lacking — the plating was clean and neat, but it desperately needed a splash of color — but the dish itself was sinfully indulgent.

For the first time that evening, The Dragon Room lived up to its manifesto. Macadamia and miso isn’t a combination that’s going to win any awards for creativity, but by no means is it mundane, nor necessarily expected. And it works as well as it should, which is to say “Got Dam noodles” at The Dragon Room are buttery, salty, sweet and, above all, absurdly decadent.

“Outstanding,” I said, as she collected the empty bowl. “Seriously,” I emphasized. “That was quite good.”

At that point, I’d asked everything I could’ve of what, setting aside the spot’s ambitious pitch, is a humble restaurant. Notwithstanding the (likely unbridgeable) ravine between the reality of the dishes and the Michelin-level culinary ingenuity diners are told to expect, The Dragon Room overdelivered, and not just against my initially low expectations.

For what, I can only assume, doubles as an affordable indulgence and a favorite drinking spot for USC’s 40,000-strong student body when classes are in just down the street, The Dragon Room’s impressively close to replicating the kind of experience you’d expect at much pricier fusion establishments operating in major metropolitan areas.

I tipped the bartender $100 and suggested that, as a writer, she might enjoy reading my monthly dispatches published on The Heisenberg Report, given that so many of them are set in the Lowcountry, where she was born and raised. She politely pretended to be interested and I extended her the same courtesy, pretending to believe she was interested, then bid her adieu.

It was only 8:45. And I was uncharacteristically in the mood for dessert. I walked next door to Di Vino Rosso. The bar was still packed. So was the dining area, save one four-top in the middle of the room.

One of the two hostesses I’d spoken to an hour and a half previous was still there. “How was The Dragon Room?” “It was fantastic, actually,” I told her. “Any chance I can get a tiramisu to go?” “You can eat it here if you like,” she said, pointing to the empty table. “Oh, I’d hate to take up a table just for dessert.” “It’s totally fine,” she insisted. “We don’t have any more reservations and the kitchen’s closing soon anyway.”

I wasn’t going to say no. She walked me through the crowd, cleared three superfluous place settings and pulled one of the chairs out for me. A server came over. “Just the tiramisu?” “And a cappuccino if it’s not too much trouble.”

I fished Willaschek out of my bag, put the book on the table next to the flatware, unfolded the napkin and put it in my lap. The pianist was still there, playing something I didn’t recognize.

By and by, the server returned with my tiramisu and an espresso with a lemon peel. “Oh, you wanted cappuccino didn’t you?” she said, feigning regret for her mistake. “It’s fine,” I said. “Are you sure?” “Totally. This is fine. Thanks.”

I rubbed the lemon peel along the rim of the cup, dropped it in and took a sip. Then I polished my dessert spoon, opened Willaschek and read the final chapter, on Kant’s legacy, seated alone at a table for four.

Kant: A Revolution In Thinking

The Dragon Room