Things were so much better when you were.
Jan 032022
Remembering
The obscurest epoch is today.
—Stevenson
Dec 312021
What has disappeared, with the decline of formal religion, is not religion but formality.
Dec 162021
Privacy was ephemeral, almost accidental, springing up here and there in that fleeting century between poverty and universal surveillance.
Sep 212021
No political ideology, according to its advocates, has ever really been tried.
Sep 102021
To choose a side of history is to excuse implicitly the atrocities committed in its name.
Jun 012021
Atrocity, A Natural History
1. It didn’t happen.
2. It was much smaller than you think.
3. It was entirely justified.
4. What we need is more such atrocities.
May 262021
The map used not to be the territory: to make it so has been the great modern project.
May 172021
There is a great deal of ruin in a nation, and eventually it finds out how much.
May 102021
In less than two centuries communism has established itself as the apex predator on civilization, a killing machine: one admires it as one admires a hardy but lethal virus, or the great white shark.
May 072021
At the beginning of civilization we hate and fear the alien; at its height we study and attempt to understand him; and in its dotage we accept and support him, and at the end prefer him to our own.