A sharp review of a book by a colleague of mine, on international geo-politics and the importance of prudence.  "What, one is forced to ask, should be made of a work that is so scrupulous in historical analysis yet so impoverished in critical self-reflection?"

An...

Learn throughout life with Aristotle!  Seriously, CDC Reeve, the author of this piece, is a great scholar of ancient philosophy; his Philosopher-Kings was hugely important for me in thinking through Plato's Republic in a way beyond all the clichés (trust me--read it), and...

I've got a big backlog so I'll try to get one of these up every day this week.  

A fascinating idea: the four-day workweek.  Long predicted, but it never quite arrives.  A nice article discussing what it might look like, how it would help businesses and employees, and why it's unlikely.

My old friend Jonathan Malesic...

My father was an infantryman in the Korean war. He served only the final six months or so of the war, in static trench fighting. It gave him the opportunity to go to college (he graduated from the Citadel, class of 1957? 1958?) and become a civil engineer, and so it gave him the capacities that led him on the amazing life he had.  The war also ruined him as a human in some ways--not for others (as he was, pretty reliably, a loving and a joyous man), but for himself.  From when I was a small child, till my last times visiting him and my mother at home when he...

I am a child of public television, in important ways. What I mean is that I reliably saw Sesame Street and Mr Rogers for the first five or six, or maybe more, years of my life.

Sesame Street was wonderful--I imagine it still is--but it had a fundamentally shallower effect on me. I remember it helping me learn to count, to know my...

Just some stuff I've found:

David Runciman interviewed by Joshua Cohen, a very sobering conversation.

Interesting: The most common kind of graduate students to study international he is a...

Thirty years ago today I was in college.  I went to college at Georgetown University, a very political school, and my friends and I were pretty gripped by politics and what we called (do the kool kids still use this phrase?) "world affairs," and 1989 was a year of some interest for geopolitics.  

I still remember the night of November 9th.  We had heard rumors all day that all sorts of things were happening, but you know, no one had the news on their phones or anything like that, so what we knew was spotty at best.

I got home at the end of the...

This article, that I've read this early morning, about Voyager 2's journey beyond the solar system, has me thinking of long distances, in space and time, and the ways in which the frenzy of the present can almost entirely obliterate our capacity to have a longer view than three seconds into the future and four feet in front of my face.

My apologies for my silence (to whom? Is anyone listening?) but I've been running about a bit.  I had hoped to have something to share with you all, but life got in the way and I have 63-74% of about four things to share. So instead of any of them, here is a basket of links to keep your mind off the abyss of meaninglessness that is life without my blog posts.

So, here you go:

Yet...