Sir Galahad in stained glass (1910) From Andrew’s Dune Church, Southampton, New York. (image source) That terrible bond, that most salutary of human bonds, those invisible threads of gold and light and blood attaching men sworn to a common endeavor! —Victor Serge, Unforgiving Years (1947) My life’s short course has brought me to many places, […]
Image Source For readers curious about my the lack of new posts over the last month, the answer is easy: I recently relocated to Cambodia, and have focused my efforts on establishing things here instead of on writing. Hopefully posting will improve a bit over the next few weeks as things become more settled down […]
Image Source. Note that this image is not from the pre-print. I just found it through googling. In that way, an explanation would be forthcoming for the future of certain nations which appear to be drawn by an unknown force towards a goal which they are unaware. –Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835) Cross-cultural psychology […]
Vizzinni: But it’s so simple. All I have to do is divine from what I know of you. Are you the sort of man who would put the poison into his own goblet, or his enemy’s? Now, a clever man would put the poison into his own goblet, because he would know that only a […]
TOP BILLING “The Recent Unpleasantness: Understanding the Cycles of Constitutional Time”Jack M. Balkin, Public Law Research Paper No. 648. 8 August 2018. (Indiana Law Journal, 2018 Forthcoming). Our present condition is a little like an eclipse, although much less enjoyable. To understand what is going on today in America, we have to think in terms […]
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 […]
The big news this week is a fresh study in Nature that reports the results of a team that sought to replicate 21 high profile experiments in social psychology, all originally published by the journals Nature or Science between the years 2010 and 2015. The study has garnered a lot of headlines. You can read […]
Yesterday’s excerpt from the Zuo Zhuan is an excellent case study in the difficulty of translating classical Chinese into English (or into modern Chinese, for that matter). Here is the sentence of interest, as translated by Stephen Durrant, Wai-yee Lee, and David Schaberg: Having watched from her bedchamber, the girl said, “Gongsun Hei is handsome, to be […]
Image source. Now that the heat of the election season has passed, it is possible to examine the heat itself. The election’s aftermath was a grand spectacle. Some convulsed in desperation and despair. Others surrendered to frenzied, twitter-fueled fits of rapture. In the midst of all this noise, a pattern arose. In simplest terms: there is a […]
Japanese geisha playing weiqi (go) c. 1800. Image Source: Wikimedia This post should be considered an extended footnote of my series on what has been written in English about the history of Chinese strategic thought. [1] As I sifted through the materials I needed for that review, I came across one trope about Chinese culture […]
