Image Source Citizens are not born. They are raised. —Frank Bryan Wesley Yang has a new series out over at Tablet Magazine on the history of the Title IX bureaucracy. Like Yang, I see Title IX as one of the crucial stepping stones on the journey to our present moment. He is a tad more […]
Image source. François Bougon’s book, Inside the Mind of Xi Jinping is excellent. It is accessible to those who have but a cursory interest in China, yet does a better job of describing the actual motives and ideology of Xi Jinping than the vast majority of writing about the man in more wonkish publications. It […]
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: […]
This video is a good demonstration of what Chinese teenagers (or in this case, a Taiwanese teenager) mean when they say the 2D world is more ‘meihao’ than the 3D one. I have spent a great deal of time with Chinese teenagers. When I lived in Beijing, I paid no rent: instead I lived in […]
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 […]
Image Source DR. STOCKMANN: It’s my own fault. I should have faced them down long ago—shown my teeth—and bite back! Call me an enemy of society! So help me God, I’m not going to swallow that! MRS. STOCKMANN: But Thomas dear, your brother does have the power— DR. STOCKMANN: Yes, but I’m in the right! […]
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 […]
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 […]
The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to [a fence] and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. […]
