Notes From All Over: A collection of recently published articles, essays, reports, or blog posts of merit.TOP BILLING “This Is What A 21st-Century Police State Really Looks Like“Megha Rajagopalan. Buzzfeed (18 October 2017). “In the countryside, if you get even one call from abroad, they will know. It’s obvious,” said R., who agreed to meet me in […]
Last week’s posting (“Everything is Worse in China”) caught the attention of Rod Dreher, who reblogged it with comments over at the American Conservative. I sent him an e-mail in response introducing a few Chinese thinkers who might be relevant to the traditionalist cause, especially in its Benedict Option version. As he has published the […]
One of the benefits of living in China is a certain sense of perspective. China exists outside of the Anglophone culture wars. It would not be accurate to say the Chinese don’t have an opinion or even a stake in American cultural crusades. They do. But our fights are not their fights, and even when […]
Image Source New Year’s Day has come and gone, meaning that it is time, per established tradition, to report the full list of books that I read over the last year. This tradition is now four years old, but I am still surprised with its popularity. These posts have not generated the highest hit counts […]
Note to readers: The following post was originally published at Zenpundit as part of the on-going Thucydides Roundtable. I encourage you to follow the comment thread there and read the other participant’s posts as they are published throughout the week.On a summer night, nearly three thousand years ago, three hundred men of Thebes, wet and mud soaked, snuck into the […]
Today Strategy Bridge published my review of Peter Harmsen’s two books on the upper-Yangtze campaigns that kicked off Asia’s World War II: Shanghai: Stalingrad on the Yangtze, and Nanjing 1937: Battle for a Doomed City. Here is an excerpt: ….Books focused on individual campaigns [of China’s WWII] are just now being written and published. Peter […]
The library I brought with me when I moved to Taipei in November. This and a kindle. A new year has arrived, and that means it is time to post my annual list of every book I have finished since the last new year’s day. I have kept a list of every book I have […]
I was delighted to receive Marjorie Garber‘s Shakespeare After All in the mail this morning. Garber’s book is a thousand page review of everything Shakespeare ever wrote, with each play claiming its own chapter length analysis. The introduction of Shakespeare After All is a fascinating tour of Shakespeare’s reputation though the centuries, describing how Shakespeare’s […]
“The King’s library at Buckingham House” from The History of Royal Residences, by William Henry Pines (1819), plate No. 48 Image Source: Wikimedia When the moment of decision arrives the time for study and reflection has ended. Decisions made under pressure often rely on heuristics, assumptions, and interpretive frames formed long before crisis arrives. Some of […]
In the December issue of International Studies Quarterly Paul Avey and Michael Desch published one of the more interesting articles to come from an academic international relations journal in a long while. For the last few years there has been a rather voracious debate within social science generally and political science specifically about whether or […]
