The relationship between disaster and revolution has seldom been explored, though it crops up throughout the history of revolutions. Catastrophic weather across France in the summer of 1788 brought on the crop failures and bad harvests that led to the rising bread prices, shortages, and hunger that played a major role in triggering the French ( Read more... )

One thing I was looking forward to as a homeowner was some really nice bookcases.
Our new house has a lot of roomy floor space, but bookshelf-appropriate walls are at a premium. So we need just the right bookshelves ( Read more... )

I just noticed that I've had a copy of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt sitting on my shelf for a few years. I was unaware of that fact, so I bought it this February as a potential recover-from-surgery book. Between my purchase and it rising to the top of my queue around June, I'd had ( Read more... )

When a single hive is scaled up to the size of a nation and is led by a dictator with an army at his disposal, the results are invariably disastrous. But that is no argument for removing or suppressing hives at lower levels. In fact, a nation that is full of hives is a nation of happy and satisfied people. It’s not a very promising target for ( Read more... )

In the same way, each individual reasoner is really good at one thing: finding evidence to support the position he or she already holds, usually for intuitive reasons. We should not expect individuals to produce good, open-minded, truth-seeking reasoning, particularly when self-interest or reputational concerns are in play. But if you put ( Read more... )

At lunch, a coworker said she used to be a bookkeeper. Another coworker asked if that meant accounting. This suggested alternate ways in which one could be a bookkeeper:The GuardThis library is a fortress of knowledge. Anyone seeking to assail these volumes must first contend with The Sword of Dewey!The Dragon's HoardI shall keep these books for ( Read more... )

In chapter 1 we described how a common psychological effect of rising insecurity is for people to become more conservative, less generous, and more zero-sum: think pre-Hitler Germany or pre-genocide Rwanda. Many decades of social science literature strongly correlates rising insecurity, fear, and pessimism with authoritarian politics. In ( Read more... )

The Conscience of a Conservative, Senator Barry Goldwater's 1960 slim volume (ghostwritten by L. Brett Bozell, Jr.) advocating for conservative values, had more impact on right-wing and Republican politics in postwar America than any book besides The Bible and, perhaps, Atlas Shrugged. I sought the book out because I wanted to understand where ( Read more... )

We have forgotten that the proper function of the school is to transmit the cultural heritage of one generation to the next generation, and so to make them capable of absorbing ancient learning and applying it to the problem of its own day.
- Barry Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative, “Some Notes on Education ( Read more... )

The turn will come… when Americans, in hundreds of communities throughout the nation, decide to put the man in power who is pledged to enforce the Constitution and restore the Republic. Who will proclaim in a campaign speech: “I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not ( Read more... )