This is a list of some of my most popular pieces. It is a good introduction to the Scholar’s Stage style and the sort of things I write about. For a list of everything I have written about, see my full index.
On modern Chinese politics and society
- “The Theory of History that Guides Xi Jinping” (8 July 2020).
- “The World That China Wants” parts I, II, and III (Jan-August 2020).
- “The Inner Life of Chinese Teenagers” (19 April 2019).
- “China Does Not Want Your Rules Based Order” (4 June 2016).
On contemporary American politics and society
- “Lessons From the 19th Century” (3 April 2023).
- “Our Problems Are Not Procedural” (15 July 2022).
- “Culture Wars are Long Wars” (3 July 2021)
- “The Problem of the New Right” (24 April 2021)
- “On Life in the Shadow of the Boomers” (28 October 2020).
- “On Cultures That Build” (18 June 2020).
- “Conservatism’s Generational Civil War” (17 March 2020).
- “Questing for Transcendence” (29 April 2019).
- “Honor, Dignity, and Victimhood: A Tour Through Three Centuries of American Political Culture” (16 September 2015).
On American foreign policy
- “Learning from Our Defeat: the Madrassas and the Modern” (20 April 2022).
- “The Assumptions of Donald Rumsfeld” (7 September 2021).
- “Give No Heed to the Walking Dead” (1 July 2019).
- “Wanted: A Stupid-Proof Strategy For America” (30 October 2015).
Strategic Theory
- “Psychology Makes the Strategist” (20 September 2018).
- “Fiction and the Strategist” (19 June 2015).
- “Chinese Strategic Tradition: A Research Program (II)” (28 May 2015).
- “Chinese Strategic Tradition: A Research Program (I)” (26 May 2015).
Political Theory
- “The Myth of Panic” (15 July 2021)
- “On Days of Disorder” (31 May 2020).
- “Vengeance As Justice: Passages I Highlighted in My Copy of “Eye for an Eye” (26 January 2018).
- “Introducing: Asabiyah” (2 May 2015).
History
- “Historians, Fear Not the Psychologists” (8 November 2019).
- “Why Didn’t China Give Birth to Democracy?” (22 July 2018).
- “History is Written by the Losers” (21 November 2016).
- “Pre-Modern Battlefields Were Absolutely Terrifying” (25 October 2015).
- “ISIS, the Mongols, and “The Return of Ancient Challenges” (18 December 2014).
- “What Edward Luttwak Doesn’t Know About Ancient China (Or a Short History of Han-Xiongnu Relations)” parts I and II (September 2014).
Literature
- “Myths of the Over-Managed” (21 July 2021)
- “A Non-Western Canon: What Would a List of Humanity’s 100 Greatest Writers Look Like?” (25 October 2019).
- “On Adding Phrases to the Language” (13 October 2019).
- “On The Tolkienic Hero” (22 March 2019).
- “Conservative Fairy Tales & Liberal Allegories?” (30 September 2017).
Miscellany
- “Public Intellectuals Have Short Shelf Lives—But Why?” (29 January 2020).