Image Source It would take gods to give men laws. —Jean-Jacques Rousseau [1762] This is going to be one of those essays where I throw a lot of things on the wall and see what sticks. We are going to range today from the American Revolution to Cambodian spirits to hunter-gatherer conceptions of authority to […]
Do not trust journalists. This is a hard thing for me to write: I am a journalist. I regularly write dispatches from abroad for various media outlets, and the occasional opinion commentary to boot. Yet I have trouble trusting journalists. Especially those who are not transparent about how they developed their understanding of the issues […]
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 […]
Source: Max Fischer and Zack Beauchamp, “14 Maps that Explain ISIS,” Vox.com (25 September 2014) This week has seen a flurry of commentary and discussion about ISIS and the proper way for France and the United States to respond to the attacks in Paris. I find myself repeating a similar set of points in many […]
Image Source. I wish I could say that this Vox hot-take by Max Fisher is the most foolish piece Vox has published and Fisher has written. Alas, this is not the case. It is a rather run-of-the-mill effort from Vox‘s foreign policy team, no more vapid than their usual fare. What distinguishes this piece from it peers is […]
A collection of articles, essays, and blog post of merit. TOP BILLING “Down With the Nihilists!” and “Love Thy Country““T.J. Ma.” Chublic Opinion. (31 & 6 August 2015). I was led to this blog by the recommendation of Kaiser Kuo and instantly knew that it needed to be on the blog roll. “T.J. Ma” writes […]
Major religions in the Middle EastImage Source: Columbia University’s Gulf 2000 Project I am not a specialist in arms control or nuclear technology. I must rely on the judgement of others with relevant expertise to assess the viability of the new agreement with Iran. This makes things difficult, for the opinions of experts I trust […]
Perhaps the most predictable fall-out of Graeme Wood’s influential cover article for The Atlantic, “What the Islamic State Really Wants,” is another round of debate over whether or not the atrocities committed by ISIS and other armed fundamentalist terrorist outfits are sanctioned by the Qur’an, Hadith, and other Islamic texts, and if not, whether these […]
A collection of articles, essays, and blog post of merit. TOP BILLING “The State of Consumer Technology at the End of 2014“Ben Thompson, Stratechery (16 December 2014). One of the defining characteristics of the three major epochs of consumer computing – PC, Internet, and mobile – is that they have been largely complementary: we didn’t […]
Car bomb in Peshawar. Source: Mohammad Sajjad/Associated Press. 29 September 2013. Last week I penned a two–post series on the purpose of and underlying reasons for the savage terrorist attacks radical Islamic groups have launched across the world. I argued that these attacks were not “senseless” acts of violence, nor merely the results of fanatic […]
