Social Behavior

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...

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...

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...

Stoner (John Williams)

When I was very young, my mother told me that the chief value of good fiction is it allows the reader to better understand other men and women. Even so, I have never read...

The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (Christopher Lasch)

It is common knowledge that the vast majority of sociology is completely worthless, or worse than worthless, and that “social science” is an oxymoron. Still, the study of the societies of man can be...

The Ancient City (Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges)

Two things about the past are simultaneously true. First, that men and women of history, even distant history, were not, in their essence, different from us. The nature of man does not change. Second,...

On Private Justice

For eighty years, Superman’s motto was “Truth, Justice, and the American Way!” In 2020, at the apogee of unchallenged Left power, it changed to “Truth, Justice, and a Better Tomorrow!” In the fantasy world...

Holy Rus’: The Rebirth of Orthodoxy in the New Russia (John P. Burgess)

Americans don’t understand the Russians. Americans don’t even try to understand the Russians, for the most part. I don’t understand the Russians, even if I should, given that my father was a professor of...