Samuel Cohn’s Epidemics: Hate and Compassion from the Plague of Athens to AIDS is true door-stop of a book, encyclopedic in ambition, coming in at a full 650 pages of prose and citations. In a new book review over at the Washington Examiner I describe the book’s origins: In the summer of 2009, Samuel Cohn, […]
Image source Ideology, which was once the road to action, has become a dead end. βDaniel Bell (1960) Yuval Levin’s 2017 book Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in the Age of Individualism has several interesting passages inside it, but none so interesting as Levin’s meditation on the generational frame that clouds the modern mind. […]
Over at the Washington Examiner I have a book review out of Timothy Brook’s The Great State: China and the World. Brook is a well regarded historian whose past work has focused on both the Ming Dynasty and on early 20th century China. This book is a popular history that narrates episodes from the Yuan Dynasty […]
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 FranΓ§ois Bougonβs 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 ThΓ©odore ChassΓ©riau (1819β1856) 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 ααααΆαααααααΎαα αα ααααΆααααααΎαααΆα Shame of ignorance leads to knowledge; shame of poverty leads to wealth. βKhmer 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 […]
