Image source Last month there was a minor hullabaloo about the latest entry in the “Kennan Sweepstakes,” a long document published by the Atlantic Council titled “The Longer Telegram.”1 I read it three times. I did not like it. This week Foreign Policy gave me some column space to explain why. I will note here […]
Much of what I have written about Taiwan defense issues assumes that the primary challenge facing Taiwanese forces and their allies is defeating (and thus deterring) a proper amphibious invasion. Two recent reports argue—convincingly, I think—that this assumption is wrong. In his testimony to Congress a few weeks ago, former DIA analyst Lonnie Henley asks […]
Last summer the New Yorker published an essay by James Marcus that asks the following question: why was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow so loved in his own lifetime when today he is so little read or respected? There is one very compelling answer to this that the article that does not discuss—indeed, that the article itself […]
Let’s talk about the grand Slate Star Codex brouhaha. A lot of people have already written about this. Here is the original New York Times piece that started the controversy. [1] Against the Grey Lady we have Cathy Young, Robby Soave, Micah Meadowcroft, Matthew Yglesias, Freddie DeBoer, Scott Aaronson, Noah Smith, and Dan Drezner, as […]
Some of the things that make “the discourse” terrible are new to social media—especially Twitter. But not all. Some other problems are very, very old. Perhaps the best guide to today’s Twitter beefs was written near three centuries ago. Listen here to one Adam Smith, theorist of moral sentiments. Our journey begins with an observation: […]
Noah Smith has a recent substack note discussing Taiwan. In the comments section there are a number of heated arguments over whether Taiwanese language, history, politics, and so forth are enough to justify thinking of Taiwan the way Smith does: as its own “civilization.” When reading through these debates I was struck by the […]
A few months ago I wrote about Oswald Spengler’s attempt at comparative world history. I expressed severe reservations with Spengler’s methods and conclusions.[1] But for me the most fascinating parts of the book were the footnotes to Spengler’s main argument. Take, for example, Spengler’s attempt to compare and contrast members of his chosen pantheon of […]
It is a new year and that means a new reader’s poll. Every year I put one of these together to get a sense for who my readers are and what they most value in The Scholar’s Stage. This is a special poll because in a few weeks a redesigned Scholar’s Stage will be launched, […]
One of the great ironies of 20th century history: Marxist revolutionaries could only ever seize power in the wrong countries. Marx imagined a revolution of industrial proletariat; he expected that this proletariat would at first achieve its aims in highly industrialized nations like England and Germany. His theory of socialism presupposed that a successful transition […]
“Twenty years ago it might have seemed as if Cambodia lay in a democratic slipstream. Now it seems like the dream of a half-forgotten age.” —Sebastian Strangio, Hun Sen’s Cambodia (2013) Two years ago I described Sebastian Strangio’s 2013 book Hun Sen’s Cambodia as one of the best books I had read that year. […]