Speaking events in Los Angeles, New York City and San Diego over a four-day period on “The Happiest Life” means not only red eyes and jet lag, but an awful bout of cognitive dissonance as the lectures on the literature and experience of happiness are occurring against a backdrop of mayhem and murder in Ukraine and Venezuela, bordered all around by the soft blur of inspirational biographies from Sochi.

Strange times, and bound to get stranger as the book’s release has generated a raft of requests from venues that ordinarily wouldn’t invite a conservative commentator within 10 miles of their doors: churches, colleges, colloquia on the good life.