As February turned to March I realized I needed a better understanding of epidemics and disaster response. It was clear to me then that the coronavirus was going to blow up in my own country, that I was going to be voicing opinions about it, and that in consequence I had a responsibility to inform […]
2020 has arrived. This means it is time for my annual tradition: listing every book I read the year previous, with my ten favorites bolded. You can find my past entries here (2018), here (2017), here (2016), here (2015), here (2014), and here (2013). As in those posts, I list the books in the approximate […]
Readers may remember a post from a few months ago where I excerpted a few of the most interesting passages of François Bougon’s Inside the Mind of Xi Jinping for the sake of public reference. This week Foreign Policy published my review of the book as a whole. Here is how I start it off: Xi […]
Othello and Desdemona in Venice by Théodore Chassériau (1819–1856) Earlier this week I suggested that major authors of world literature could be divided into three categories. Each of the categories is an attitude towards fictional and dramatic narrative. I labeled the three approaches as that of the artificer, the reporter, and the fabulist. In that […]
This piece began as a continuation of a post I wrote some months ago, “A Study Guide For Human Society, Part I.” That post laid out my thoughts on the best way to organize one’s history reading. I promised my Patreon subscribers that I would continue the series with a post laying out my personal […]
A man who added phrases to the language George Orwell was a fantastic essayist. One of my favorite of his small essays is his response to an essay by T.S. Eliot that assessed the life and work of Rudyard Kipling. I am not sure what it was about Rudyard Kipling that brought out the best […]
Image source ខ្មាសល្ងងទើបចេះ ខ្មាសក្រទើបមាន Shame of ignorance leads to knowledge; shame of poverty leads to wealth. —Khmer Proverb Earlier this week I was grousing on twitter about books like Ursuala Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, Frank Herbert’s Dune, Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, or Ian Banks Culture series. The obvious connection between all […]
Lawrence Freedman’s Strategy: A History is gargantuan. Really. This intellectual history clocks in at over 760 pages. It narrates various theorists’ attempts to discover and describe the principles of strategy over the last few centuries of Western thought. Freedman covers many definitions of the word ‘strategy’ but never settles on any one of them: the […]
Flappers playing mahjong. Image source. Last week’s post, “If You Were to Write a History of 21st Century America, What Would It Look Like?,” asked what a 21st century version of Frederick Lewis Allen’s Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s might look like. Here is how I described the book in that post: […]
One of the best histories I have had the pleasure to read is Frederick Lewis Allen’s Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s. There are many things to love about this book. Allen wrote his history of the 1920’s in a jaunty, breezy style. When you pick his book up it is hard to […]
