“De Botton’s growing cultural presence, especially his recent forays into museum curation with his Art as Therapy project, has inflamed long-standing antipathy toward him from critics, both in the U.K. and in the U.S. Critics on the right attack him for diluting the purity of his sources, while those on the left accuse him of fashioning meaning where there is only historical contingency and politics. Ultimately, though, de Botton’s varied initiatives are best seen as a mostly salutary, if wildly ambitious and sometimes misfiring, effort to ennoble modern urban life.”