I will be traveling a bit over the next few months. I have decided to set up a few public meet-ups on these travels; anybody who reads the Scholar’s Stage is invited. These are the dates and locations: Taipei, Taiwan — 9 November (Saturday), 6:00 PM-9:00 PM(ish)San Fransisco, California —18 December (Wednesday), 5:30 PM-10:00 PM(ish)Salt […]
Harold Bloom is dead. His death has prompted one final, staggered brawl between the exhausted ranks who have spent away their strength with three decades of culture warring. My personal assessment of Bloom is that he was an excellent salesman and a stupendous reader, but an uninspired critic. With the concept of a ‘canon’ or […]
Over at Foreign Policy I have a new column out reviewing Jonathan Ward’s China’s Vision of Victory. The column is not actually new; it has been on the news-stands for several weeks now in Foreign Policy‘s print edition. But it only went online two days ago. I use the review as a chance to open […]
A man who added phrases to the language George Orwell was a fantastic essayist. One of my favorite of his small essays is his response to an essay by T.S. Eliot that assessed the life and work of Rudyard Kipling. I am not sure what it was about Rudyard Kipling that brought out the best […]
Hannah Arendt(image source) Yesterday Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin asked the following question on twitter: Name your top three public figures you wish were still alive right now to comment on what’s happening in our country. I’ll go first (in no particular order): John McCain, Christopher Hitchens, Hunter S. Thompson. [1] A lot of people were […]
image Source Today is a grand anniversary for the Communist Party of China. You will read many things about its meaning and significance. In the eyes of Party members themselves, I suspect one particular fact will stand out: this is the year the Communist Party of China outlasts the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. […]
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 How many people ruin themselves by laying out money on trinkets of frivolous utility? What pleases these lovers of toys is not so much the utility, as the aptness of the machines which are fitted to promote it. All their pockets are stuffed with little conveniencies. They contrive new pockets, unknown in the […]
The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society. —James Madison Dean Karalekas writes the following in his PhD thesis, Identity and Transformation: Perceptions of Civil-Military Relations in the Republic of China […]
Image source I have a new piece out in Foreign Policy. It takes a look at the changing balance of power between Pacific Command and the PLA, with a special focus on the vulnerabilities of US Forces Japan. This section describes the problem: The threat posed by China to forces stationed in Japan is real: […]