Charles

The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity (Tim Wu)

Tim Wu is the Jeremiah of our age. For twenty years, his has been one of the very few nuanced voices attacking concentrations of economic power as destructive of a flourishing society. Yes, others...

Announcement: Cross-Posting to Substack

This site has been the primary publishing spot for my writing for nearly ten years and more than six hundred (!) articles. This is not going to change. However, I am now cross-posting to...

On Power: The Natural History of Its Growth (Bertrand de Jouvenel)

For years, I put off reading On Power, despite seeing frequent references to it. The book seemed, as filtered through online discourse (my first mistake), to be merely another tedious libertarian manifesto. Moreover, dimwits...

The Collapse of Global Liberalism: And the Emergence of the Post Liberal World Order (Philip Pilkington)

We all want to know comes next, because we sense that it will be very different from what came before. This is a book not so much about our uncertain future, but about why...

Leaving a Legacy: Inheritance, Charity, & Thousand-Year Families (Johann Kurtz)

The Great Commission of the modern age is not to bring the Gospel to all nations. It is to CONSOOM! Thus, a man’s perceived success in life is determined mostly by how many resources...

Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity (Paul Kingsnorth)

In the Book of Daniel, the prophet interprets Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of an awesome statue. It boasts a golden head and silver body, but it has feet of iron mixed with clay. And when those...

In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife (Sebastian Junger)

I am not sure how often most people think about death. For myself, I think about my death several dozen times per day. This is not a morbid fixation, merely focused self-interest combined with...

Cornwallis: Soldier and Statesman in a Revolutionary World (Richard Middleton)

To the extent most people ever think about Charles, Earl Cornwallis, they think of him as portrayed in Mel Gibson’s film The Patriot. There he is an aged, somewhat hapless, conflicted military officer, ultimately...

The Essential Paul Gottfried: Essays from 1984–2024 (Paul Gottfried)

Paul Gottfried is a great man, and you should read this book. He has spent decades offering a consistent political message, paleoconservatism, a name he coined. Of itself, his philosophy would certainly be of...

On the United Kingdom, and 1989 Eastern Europe as Harbinger

As the cliché goes, history does not repeat, but it does rhyme. Thirty-five years ago the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe collapsed overnight, something that nobody in the West had foreseen. It turned out,...