There's some good data in this piece about mass shootings.  Turns out mass shootings haven't grown in number, but have been stable across several decades (though I suspect the crucial inflection...

A few weeks ago, I read a piece in the New York Review of Books on the World War II diaries of Ernst Jünger. Jünger, as you may or may not know, was a German intellectual who lived from 1895 to 1998...

It's not a big insight to say that social media seems to be a technology designed to make us worse versions of ourselves, and addict us to it.  I've found a number of Cal Newport's pieces on this...

Just because I'm feeling munificent.

Well, the Kafkaesque Prozess of getting Kafka's papers to a reliable public institution seems to have come to an end.  We don't know what will be...

Cal Newport has been writing some interesting things about what he calls "deep work," by which I think he means actually, well, work--concentrated and focused intellectual attention on a problem...

Here in Charlottesville, August 12, 2017, was a day that I feel instantly became "an event" to be recorded in history books.  But to me it all feels, in retrospect, like a disjointed cubist...

The idea of thinking about global development is a relatively new one. And the vision of what politics looks like in this report from the Brookings Institution is very different from the great power...

Your thought for the day:

This piece, and the piece that provoked it, have both got me thinking today.  Is our problem that we are too naive and idealistic, too moralistic, or too cynical? ...

I want to post things on this blog that are not so much "current events" as pieces that help you understand current events--either by contextualizing them in terms of larger and historically longer...

I have been interested for more than a decade, in a somewhat casual and amateurish way, in the thinking of Ibn Khaldun, the 14th century Islamic (more specifically, Maghrebian) jurist, politician...