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Philosophy

The Long View: From Dawn to Decadence

Jacques Barzun's masterwork is an intellectual roadmap to the Western mind, although its structure is not systematic. Rather, Barzun simply writes about the people and things he found interesting. Since he had a very broad and capacious mind, this amounts to just about everything of importance, but from

The Long View: The Ethics of Globalization by Peter Singer

It is a bit of an understatement to say that Peter Singer isn't one of my favorite philosophers. I do have to give the man credit for rigorous intellectual consistency however. He pursues the implications of his positions with single-minded determination. And since his starting points are largely

Host Cell Lines and Homo Sapiens

Greg Cochran has re-posted an interesting article about host cell lines. A host cell line is a microorganism that was until fairly recently a part of some higher organism – roughly speaking, a contagious cancer. We know of one good example, transmissible venereal tumor, also known as canine venereal sarcoma or

Shortcut Book Review

Shortcut Book Review

Alexander cuts the Gordian KnotShortcut: How Analogies Reveal Connections, Spark Innovation, and Sell our Greatest Ideas by John Pollack Gotham Books, 2014 $27.00; 256 pages ISBN 978-1-592-40849-8 I received this book for free as part of LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program. This was a fun little book. Pollack

The Long View: If Jesus Had Never Been Born

Another early bit of alternative history from John, written nineteen years ago. This one seems appropriate for Lent, when the Aliens and Hitler Channel invariably runs a documentary on how aliens wrote the Bible, or some such nonsense. This is another one of my favorite pieces by John, where he

Live, Die, Repeat Movie and Book Review

Directed by Doug Liman Written by Christopher McQuarrie, Jez Butterworth, John-Henry Butterwork, and Hiroshi Sakurazaka Starring Tom Cruise, Emily Blunt, and Bill Paxton All You Need is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka Haikasoru 2009 $7.99; 203 pages ISBN 978-421560878 This is one story with three titles. The original Japanese light

The Long View: Warrior Politics

The opening entry of this review explains much of John's views on the Middle East. And also why this article was published in First Things. Robert Kaplan has spent these past 20 years reporting on local collapses of civilization, chiefly in sub-Saharan Africa, the Balkans, and the Middle