Making Sense of Chinese History: A Reading List

A picture of a book shelf I own. We often hear of people who will descend to any servility, submit to any insult for the sake of getting themselves or their children into what is euphemistically called good society. Did it ever occur to them that there is a select society of all the centuries […]

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Teaching the Humanities as Terribly as Possible

Vasily Perov, Portrait of Dostoevsky, 1872. The function of the Negro college, then, is clear: it must maintain the standards of popular education, it must seek the social regeneration of the Negro, and it must help in the solution of problems of race contact and co-operation. And finally, beyond all this, it must develop men. […]

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Pining for Democracy: A Few Readings

  Norman Rockwell, draft version of Freedom of Speech (1943). “In the United States… there is nothing the human will despairs of attaining through the free action of the combined power of individuals.”   —Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol I (1835) American democracy and the civic life that supports it is in decline. This is […]

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Psychology Makes the Strategist

Military activity is never directed against material force alone; it is always aimed simultaneously at the moral forces which give it life, and the two cannot be separated. —Carl von Clausewitz, On War I have a new double-book review up at Strategy Bridge. This time both books were written by the same person: King’s College […]

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Notes From All Over 04/08/2018 (WEIRD Catholics, Chinese Intimidation Tactics, and Human Genetics)

A collection of articles, essays, and blog post of merit. TOP BILLING “The Origins of WEIRD Psychology”Jonathan Schulz, Duman Barahmi-Rad, Jonathan Beauchamp, and Joseph Henrich. PsyArXiv. 2 July 2018. Recent research not only confirms the existence of substantial psychological variation around the globe but also highlights the peculiarity of populations that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, […]

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Book Notes — Military Strategy: A Very Short Introduction

Antulio Echevarria’s Military Strategy: A Very Short Introduction is a short and accessible introduction to military strategy, as ‘strategy’ is thought about and debated in American national security circles today. It will be a useful read for many simply as introduction to the terminology of the modern defense intellectual. Echevarria has both the strengths and weaknesses of […]

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Vengeance As Justice: Passages I Highlighted in My Copy of “Eye for an Eye”

William Ian Miller’s Eye for an Eye did not make it into my “top ten books I read this year” list for 2017, but it was one of the more thought-provoking things I read last year. Miller is an unusual creature: part law professor, part medievalist, Miller is equally comfortable discussing ancient Hittite legal decrees, the […]

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