OVER THE LAST WEEK Christian Whiton’s essay “How Taiwan Lost Trump” has ricocheted its way through the Taiwanese media. Ever sensitive to foreign perceptions of Taiwan, the Taiwanese chattering cla…| The Scholar's Stage
NEITHER THE MALE AUTHORS NOR THE MALE READERS most preoccupied with middle age are inclined to face it cleanly. The male author depicts the mid-life crisis to escape his own. His novels and screenp…| The Scholar's Stage
LAST OCTOBER I published a short breakdown of four geopolitical ‘schools’ that might shape China strategy under Trump. That piece was a pre-election preview of a much larger report I was writing fo…| The Scholar's Stage
THERE ARE DECADES WHEN possibility is constrained in a narrow frame. The terrain has been surveyed, boundaries have been laid, and rules have been established. In such an age there is still room fo…| The Scholar's Stage
In November 2024, I traveled to India as part of a delegation hosted by the India Foundation. The foundation is a part of the new nationalist establishment steering Indian society. As they see thin…| The Scholar's Stage
MIDWAY through his 900 page history of biology, zoologist Ernst Mayr considers the problem posed by Alfred Wallace. Wallace was a contemporary of Charles Darwin who independently developed a theory…| The Scholar's Stage
MANY HAVE TRIED to pin Trump to Heritage’s “Project 2025.” The Trump campaign has not only refused to endorse Project 2025—they have refused to endorse any detailed policy plan whatsoever. Trump pr…| The Scholar's Stage
IN WESTERN PHILOSOPHY AND AESTHETICS a contrast is sometimes made between the Dionysian and the Apollonian. Made famous by Nietzsche, this schema was first used to describe the thought and art of Ancient Greece. On the Apollonian end we have all that is rational, intentional, structured, abstract, or well ordered; on the Dionysian side we find all that is passionate, instinctual, chaotic, sensual or protean. The Apollonian strain of western culture is associated with daylight, law, mathematic...| The Scholar's Stage
IN 2009 PAUL GRAHAM WROTE A THOUGHTFUL ESSAY titled “Cities and Ambition.” There he proposes that a great city is defined by the sort of ambitions it kindles—or perhaps more accurately, the sort of ambitious it gathers. As Graham puts it:| The Scholar's Stage
I often draw a distinction between the political elites of Washington DC and the industrial elites of Silicon Valley with a joke: in San Francisco reading books, and talking about what you have rea…| The Scholar's Stage
Two items of interest passed through my feeds this week. The first is the podcast Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz released to explain why they are endorsing Trump for president. The second is an ev…| The Scholar's Stage
The Republican and Democratic parties are not the same: power flows differently within them. The two big political news items of this week—the happenings of the Republican National Convention and t…| The Scholar's Stage
A few items of interest to my readers: First, at the end of last month I appeared on the German Marshall Fund’s China Global podcast to discuss the CPC’s current techno-industrial drive…| The Scholar's Stage
Does China have a plan to save its wobbly economy? Last week in Foreign Policy I argued that it does—but not the sort of plan most Western economists are comfortable with. Western analysts blame sl…| The Scholar's Stage
There is a passage in Democracy in America that has appeared in many of my essays.” In the United States,” Tocqueville reports, “there is nothing the human will despairs of attaining through …| The Scholar's Stage
A few years back Ross Douthat published an interesting book titled The Decadent Society: How We Became Victims of Our Own Success. The thesis of Douthat’s book is simple: American society is …| The Scholar's Stage
We are told that we “lost the culture war.” I dissent from this view: we never waged a culture war. Conservatives certainly fought, there is no denying that. We fought with every bit of obstruction…| The Scholar's Stage
Ending his decade of silence, the voice of Marc Andreessen rises from the dust, trumpeting forth a rousing cri de coeur: “It is time to build.” Andreessen’s essay has got a lot of…| The Scholar's Stage
Xi Jinping’s decision to openly label the United States the source of China’s ills rolled through the newsletters, wire services, and commentators on China this week. Much has been written about th…| The Scholar's Stage
Yesterday the Wall Street Journal published a letter I wrote to their editor in response to Kevin Rudd’s exposition on Xi Jinping’s “Common Prosperity” campaign:| The Scholar's Stage
The political project of the “post liberals” is not my own. Many of their critiques of contemporary American life and politics mirror what I have written; many of their suggestions for the future o…| The Scholar's Stage
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 pa…| The Scholar's Stage
Readers of the Scholar’s Stage will be familiar with a thesis I have pursued in multiple essays and posts over the last half decade: America was once a place where institutional capacity was …| The Scholar's Stage
In an essay published in 2018, Geramie Barme recommends observers of US-China relations read through five pieces that Hu Qiaomu and Mao Zedong published in 1949 under the latter’s name. The f…| The Scholar's Stage
Japan’s 2022 National Security Strategy concludes with a dramatic pronouncement: At this time of an inflection point in history, Japan is finding itself in the midst of the most severe and co…| The Scholar's Stage
My annual list of books arrives a bit later than usual. However, this delay is in some ways fortunate. Now my list will not be seen as an extended comment on the Lex Friedman reading list discourse…| The Scholar's Stage
On January 16th the friends of Cao Zhixin, a 27 year old book editor residing in Beijing, posted a video of Cao onto Youtube. The video spread quickly spread across Chinese language Twitter, and fr…| The Scholar's Stage
The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to [a fence] and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If…| The Scholar's Stage
