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The Long View: Spymaster The Real-Life Karla, His Moles, and the East German Secret Police

Another old review, written when John was reviews editor of Culture Wars magazine. John decided to part ways with Culture Wars, for reasons he explains here. A fascinating look at espionage and the Cold War, overlapping slightly with my own book review on American Spies. Spymaster: The Real-Life Karla, His

The Long View: Hitler's Willing Executioners

John linked to this early book review in his blog post about Goldhagen's slander of Pope Pius XII. John clearly changed his mind about the quality of Goldhagen's work in between the two. John does note in his earlier work that Goldhagen was given to reading

The Long View: Constitution of the Ecumenical Empire

John was very interested in the form the future might take. He wrote a book that was his attempt to limn the future by means of a program he wrote in BASIC and the ideas of Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee. Like myself, John felt that the idea of cycles

The Long View: In Search of a Usable Apocalypse

John never thought much of the increasingly popular zombie apocalypse. He did do a pretty favorable review of World War Z, but he regarded zombies are mere meat puppets. Nonetheless, John was a scholar of the apocalyptic, a subject has mostly become a matter of folk religion in America. Recently,

The Long View: After Darwin

One of John's best quotes is this: In 1914, when the century began to manifest its characteristic features, the guiding spirits of the time were Freud and Marx and Darwin and Einstein. In 1989, when in a political sense the 20th century was already over, the guiding spirits

The Long View 2002-01-25 Papal Election Campaign goes Negative

John did a lot of yeoman's work exposing the shoddy work that lay under claims that Pius XII somehow didn't do enough to prevent the Holocaust. This is a lie with legs, but John did as much as anyone to point out how deeply silly it

The Long View 2002-01-21 Crusaders

One of the reasons I wanted to look back over John's writings 12 years later, is I'm curious how well his predictions turned out. One of John's intellectual interests was what he called macrohistory or metahistory, the study of models of history. In the