Why healthcare, housing and college tuition are now so expensive The United States by any money-based standard is a wealthy country. Yet much of its population struggles financially—and this struggling subset extends well beyond the demographic groups that are traditionally dependent on handouts. Around 50 million people in the US use food banks, implying thatRead More| JAMES THE OBSCURE
What is the true cause of American Performative Violence? On a recent Saturday in always-sunny Palm Springs, California, a 25-year-old who could have been your son or mine drove his car into a parking lot behind a fertility clinic and set off a homemade bomb within the car, in an effort to obliterate the clinicRead More| JAMES THE OBSCURE
The “empathy economy” has become dangerously unbalanced The term “empathy economy” has been used to describe the practice, in our feminized age, of appealing to or claiming “empathy”—usually meaning empathetic compassion—in business advertising. I think it is more useful to consider the term in a different sense, that of a resource that flows in itsRead More| JAMES THE OBSCURE
Notes on the disappearance of Western ethnonationalism If you have spent significant time outside the Western world, you may have noticed that non-Western peoples retain many of the traditional cultural traits that Westerners have abandoned. One of these traits is ethnonationalism: the basing of the nation upon a supermajority core ethnicity or cluster of relatedRead More| JAMES THE OBSCURE
What if science is becoming toxic to human society? In the summer of 1950, Nobel-winning nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi didn’t understand the scale of the cosmos as we understand it today. But he knew that it was at least hundreds of millions of light-years across, encompassing thousands of galaxies and more than a trillionRead More| JAMES THE OBSCURE
a short history The design of RMS Titanic, with its multiple watertight compartments, made it seem, even to experts of the day, “practically unsinkable.” So it proved—right up until the night it sank. It might now be a good idea to view the American political system with the skepticism that Titanic’s design deserved. OverRead More| JAMES THE OBSCURE
Thoughts on tauromaquia. Originally published 20 July 2016 About a hundred fair Julys ago—it seems that long anyway—I ran with the bulls in Pamplona. If you’d asked me why back then, I would have said simply that it seemed a fun thing to do, a thrill, an “experience” to tick off a tourist’s list.Read More| JAMES THE OBSCURE