When I was very young, my mother told me that the chief value of good fiction is it allows the reader to better understand other men and women. Even so, I have never read much fiction. Moreover, most of what I do read is science fiction, which is usually not “good” in the sense of| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
As will surprise nobody who is paying any attention, I am preparing for war. Why hide it? Although only a fool or someone with a distorted moral sense would actually wish for war, what we wish has little to do with it. Intermittent war is the natural state of man, whatever Steven Pinker may say,| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
Cass Sunstein has gathered an ensemble cast of today’s intellectual Davoisie to tell us, in seventeen separate essays, whether Trump is the harbinger of American structural doom, and if so, how. It is illuminating to read this book immediately after having read Glenn Reynolds’s The Judiciary’s Class War, with its distinction between the ruling Front-Row| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
Among the many gaping holes in American historical knowledge is any grasp of the French Revolution (and that includes my own knowledge). As an abstract matter, this is unfortunate, but nothing notable, given that the historical knowledge of modern Americans is essentially one large gap. As a concrete matter, though, it is a real problem,| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
Given that zombie survival manuals and similar how-to books are today all the rage, on sale at every Costco, Edward Luttwak’s Coup d’État: A Practical Handbook seems like a selection from the same genre. Namely, of somewhat jokey books that purport to tell you what to do in a strange, disastrous situation, while effectively acknowledging| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -