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The Long View 2007-10-31: Halloween Pandering; Sidney Reilly; Rational Choice; Dark Star Scandal

When I read this post the first time, I didn’t really see what John was getting at: The increasing incidence of zombies is not a good sign, I think. Vampires are evil (or penitent) and werewolves have pathos, but zombies are just meatpuppets. They do not imply a moral

The Long View: The Years of Rice and Salt

This book review is the source of one of my favorite cocktail party theories: a number of seemingly well-established sciences are built upon an n of 1. In a grand sense, geology and biology fall into this category, since the big theories like plate tectonics and evolution depend on one

The Long View: The Reformation

John reviews a fine one-volume history of the Reformation, marred by a jarring lapse into modern obsessions at the end. The Reformation: A History By Diarmaid MacCulloch Viking, 2004 800 Pages, US$35.95 ISBN: 0670032964 In the later volumes of A Study of History, Arnold Toynbee came to the

Spengler's Future Updated

I added in a hyperlinked table of contents to Spengler's Future, John's programmatic [literally, he used BASIC] comparison of Rome, Egypt, the Ottoman Turks, and that offshoot of northwest Europe current known as the West. This is all rather fun, as long as you take it

The Long View: Millennium: A History of the Last Thousand Years

Prior to 1500, the idea that Northwestern Europe and its disapora would come to dominate the world would have seemed pretty strange. One can make a case that this is a temporary state of affairs. All of the ancient seats of civilization were in other places, and had been for

Linkfest 2017-02-17

A Big Little Idea Called Legibility A fine analysis of how utopian ideals fail. John Horton Slaughter John Horton Slaughter, Lawman Last August, I read It Happened in Arizona, a series of short chapters on Arizona history. After reading that book, I realized that a lot of early settlers in

The Long View: Spirit Wars

Now nearly twenty years old, this book review is a pretty good primer of the cultural movements in America that made the Da Vinci Code a best-seller. So far, the biggest religious revival of the early twenty-first century has been an increasing lack of religious affiliation at all. The Second