I was one-shotted in my teens by the way Guns, Germs, and Steel ✨explained everything✨ and I’ve been chasing that dragon ever since. At this point honestly half the books I’ve reviewed could probably be described as arguments against Jared Diamond. But that’s okay. I can stop any time. Just one more sweeping transdisciplinary exploration of global history. Just let me see a map of British coalfields next to a chart of GDP per capita and I promise I’ll go back to that book about esoteric writing. C’mon, bro, I won’t ever talk about the Hajnal Line again, I swear. Just let me have one more study of an under-appreciated causal factor for the differing trajectories of human societies and I’m done. I have this under control.
Jane Psmith, “BRIEFLY NOTED: Further Arguments Against Jared Diamond”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-11-03.
March 13, 2026
QotD: “I was one-shotted in my teens by Guns, Germs, and Steel“
March 11, 2026
QotD: Traitors are worse than open enemies so we hate them more
Officer Frenly (High IQ) @FrenlyOfficer
The most hated character from Harry Potter is not Voldemort. It’s not Bellatrix. Not even Draco.It’s Umbridge.
Ask yourself why.
Simple.
Umbridge does one thing the main villain doesn’t do, that none of the other villains do.
She pretends to be on the heroes’ side. And prevents them from defending themselves.
This is how the human mind evolved. Foemen, tribal enemies who oppose us on the field of battle, provoke our fear, anger, even hatred. But traitors provoke our contempt and disgust.
We instinctively know that a disloyal friend is worse than an enemy.
Against an enemy, we can defend ourselves, and our tribe will support us. Oppose the traitor, and she will cry that she is an innocent victim, and we are the evil ones.
The traitor not only betrays her own tribe, she turns her tribe against each other.
But it’s worse than that. The enmity between this tribe and that, between lion and zebra, between farmer and rat, is dictated by opposing interests, by incompatible needs.
Our cruelty to the foe is forced upon us. It is the indifference of the universe, manifesting its conclusion through us. It’s adaptation, not sadism.
The traitor isn’t like that. She didn’t have to do it. She could have supported the tribe, and everyone, including her, would have been fine.
The traitor didn’t have her path forced on her. She chose it out of spite, or for gain.
Traitors are worse. So we hate them more.
Devon Eriksen, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-11-28.
March 10, 2026
Rolling toward disaster – North America’s trucking industry
Donna Laframboise reviews a new memoir by Gord Magill, recounting his career in trucking in Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand:
… Gord has written a splendid book that belongs on Economics 101 reading lists everywhere. End of the Road: Inside the War on Truckers is chock-a-block with firsthand anecdotes. He tells us, for example, about traveling north into Canada from New York state during the 2022 Freedom Convoy protest, and feeling “drunk with patriotism, in love with every person I met, and they were in love with me”. After returning to his wife and daughters south of the border, he says he’d “never seen so many Canadian flags flying in the United States. It was unbelievable.” For a short time, “I was a minor celebrity simply for being from Canada”.
But this book is more than a collection of quirky tales about life behind the wheel. It’s a deep dive into shark-infested waters. For decades, but especially in recent years, experienced truckers have been treated like disposable widgets rather than skilled professionals. An industry upon which much of the North American economy depends has been undermined and hollowed out by perverse economic incentives, widespread fraud, and foolish policy. All of this makes our highways dangerous.
Gord explains that members of the public are three times more likely to be killed in a truck crash in America than down under partly because Australia has a graduated, quasi-apprentice licensing system. After driving smaller trucks for a year, people apply for the next level of trucking license, and then the next level, and then the next.
In North America these days, licenses seem to be given out like breath mints. The driver who blew through a stop sign in rural Saskatchewan in 2018, killing sixteen people associated with the Humboldt Broncos junior hockey team and injuring 13 others had less than one month of trucking experience. Yet he was behind the wheel of one of the largest configurations on the road (two interconnected trailers, known in the industry as a Super B-train). In Australia, that same driver would have needed a minimum of four years of experience and would have completed multiple courses and passed multiple tests before being entrusted with such a load.
Gord reminds us about the Ethiopian driver (on a work visa) who plowed into traffic that had slowed to a halt in a Texas construction zone last March. Five people — including a family of two parents and two young children — were killed, eleven others were sent to hospital, and seventeen vehicles were damaged. In that case, the driver reportedly had only four months of trucking experience.
Shortly afterward, in August 2025, three people died in Florida when, as Gord writes, “a tractor trailer attempted to pull an illegal U-turn through a small access point in the median … As the driver of the truck executed the turn, he pulled in front of a minivan, which ran into his trailer at high speed.”
The trucker in that case, an illegal immigrant from India, had somehow acquired commercial driver’s licenses in two US states. But when an English proficiency test was administered a few days after the accident, he answered only 2 of 12 verbal questions correctly and could identify only 1 of 4 traffic signs. It was later reported he’d failed his commercial trucking exam ten times during a two-month period.
Then there’s the trucker who drove an 18-wheeler weighing forty tons across a bridge with a clearly posted weight limit of six tons in rural Arkansas in 2018. The bridge collapsed and the truck sank into the river. It took seven months to extract it, while the bridge remained out-of-service for years.
March 8, 2026
Performative … reading?
Nicole James talks about a secretive cult of readers who — I’m afraid to even say it — read books in public, specifically to be seen reading books in public:
Reading has become competitive, which is impressive when you consider that it is an activity performed while sitting down and moving only the eyes. In theory, intellectually competitive reading would involve fierce debates in candlelit rooms, people slamming piles of Dostoevsky onto tables, and shouting things like, “You’ve misunderstood the moral ambiguity of suffering!” before storming out into the night to reflect meaningfully. In practice, it involves sitting in a café in Ridgewood holding a copy of the Iliad while pretending not to notice that three separate people have already noticed. And then pretending not to notice yourself noticing that they have noticed, which is where the true athleticism begins.
Because reading has slowly repositioned itself from private hobby to public personality trait. This is called performative reading, and it is less about engaging with ideas and more about being seen in the act of possibly engaging with ideas. It requires a certain book, a certain environment, and a certain facial expression. Specifically, a face suggesting that thoughts are currently underway.
The extraction of the book from the bag is an art form in itself.
It must not look like you packed it specifically for display. That would reek of planning, and planning is death to mystique. No, the book must appear to have happened to you. As though, midway through reaching for lip balm or car keys, you encountered it unexpectedly. “Oh,” your expression must suggest, “are you here too? How curious.”
The bag should be opened with a kind of languid inevitability. Do not rummage through your bag. Rummaging implies receipts. Crumpled tissues. A muesli bar from 2019. The book must be located swiftly, as if it occupies a reserved, velvet-lined chamber within your otherwise chaotic life.
You lift it out slowly. This is a text. Ideally one with a cover that signals moral seriousness or tasteful despair.
The removal must be conducted at a volume slightly above whisper. There may be a soft thud as it meets the table. A decisive, cultured thud. The kind of thud that says, “I have opinions about late-stage capitalism”.
Then, and this is critical, you do not open it immediately. That would look eager. Instead, you place it beside your coffee. The coffee must appear faintly architectural.
Only once the book is resting in full view do you adjust it by half a centimeter. A sleeve may be pushed back. A wrist revealed. The lighting should imply that you have recently contemplated something ancient and mildly troubling. Several photos are taken. One will be selected after rejecting seventeen for “looking too literate.”
The caption must be controlled. Something like:
Revisiting this.
“Revisiting” suggests that you and the book have history. You have both grown. You have both suffered.
And when it is finally time to return the book to the bag, this too must be handled with restraint. It slides back in as though it has completed a small but meaningful public service. The performance ends. The book remains unread. But visible. Which, as we all know, is the point.
QotD: Reading books versus remembering books
“What about people who can’t read?” I asked, thinking of all the illiterates in my year group at school. “Don’t they have human rights, too?”
My mother snorted with laughter, as if I’d told a dirty joke. “Oh, that’s precious!” she said, wiping her eyes, and I raced upstairs to bury my nose in the first book I could find.
To be fair, I’d no idea back then what the passage of time does to the brain; that knowledge is never accrued, only forgotten. As an adult, I’ve trudged my way through the entire oeuvres of a good number of literary giants, and not only do I remember bugger all about what I read in any of those books, I’ve entirely forgotten that I read the vast majority of those books at all. Worse, when people ask my opinion about one of their renowned authors, I frown bewilderedly and say, “Who?”, their very existence having somehow been completely blotted from my mind. In my lowest moments, I even add, “Oh, I’ve never heard of him/her. I’ll have to give him/her a try. Which book of his/hers would you recommend I start with?” Only when I’m several chapters into one of these titles does a muffled bell ring somewhere at the back of my broken brain. Hang on, I think, didn’t I read something a bit like this once before? Then I accuse Dostoyevsky of plagiarism.
Dominic Hilton, “All Booked Up”, The Critic, 2020-08-17.
March 5, 2026
QotD: Chinese cooking
What is it like? Well, Dunlop barely manages to cover this in a 400-page book, so I hesitate even to try, but let me hit a few of the high points. First, diversity. China is a continent masquerading as a country, both in population and in geographic extent, so its cuisine is comparably diverse. Most cooking traditions have one or two basic starches, China has four or five.1 China extends through every imaginable biome, from rainforest to tundra, desert to marshlands, and much of the genius of Chinese food lies in combining the delicious bounties offered up by this kaleidoscope in interesting or unexpected ways.
One way to think of Chinese eating is that much of it is a sort of “internal” fusion cuisine. Because China was ruled from very early on by a centralized bureaucracy with a fanaticism for river transport, the process of culinary remixing has been going on for much longer than it has in most places. The Roman Empire could have been like this, but the shores of the Mediterranean all have pretty similar climates, so there were fewer ingredients to start the process with. Already very early in Chinese history, before the 7th century, we hear of the imperial city being supplied with:
oranges and pomelos from the warm South, […] the summer garlic of southern Shanxi, the deer tongues of northern Gansu, the Venus clams of the Shandong coast, the “sugar crabs” of the Yangtze River, the sea horses of Chaozhou in Guangdong, the white carp marinated in wine lees from northern Anhui, the dried flesh of a “white flower snake” [a kind of pit viper] from southern Hubei, melon pickled in rice mash from southern Shanxi and eastern Hubei, dried ginger from Zhejiang, loquats and cherries from southern Shanxi, persimmons from central Henan, and “thorny limes” from the Yangtze Valley.
If we think of chefs as artists, the Chinese ones have since ancient times had the advantage of an outrageously diverse set of paints. But these ingredients aren’t combined willy-nilly, without respect for their time or place of origin. The Chinese practically invented the concept of terroir, and their organicist conception of the universe in which everything is connected to everything else implied strict rules about which foods were to be eaten when, both for maximum deliciousness and to ensure cosmic harmony.
In the first month of spring, [the emperor] was to eat wheat and mutton; in summer, pulses and fowl; in autumn, hemp seeds and dog meat; in winter, millet and suckling pig. An emperor’s failure to observe the laws of the seasons would not only cause disease, but provoke crop failure and other disasters.
The obsessions with freshness and seasonality come to their culmination in the one area where Chinese cuisine stands head and shoulders above all others: green vegetables. In the West, “eating your greens” is a punishment, or at best a chore, and it’s easy to see why. In much of the world vegetables are bred for yield and transportability, kept in refrigerators for weeks, and then boiled until no trace of flavor remains. Dunlop and I have one thing in common: when we’re not in China, of all the delights of Chinese cooking it’s the green vegetables that we miss the most.
When I bring American friends to a real Chinese restaurant, sometimes they’re shocked that the vegetable dishes cost the same amount as the main courses. Why does a side dish cost so much? But no Chinese person would ever think of a vegetable course as a “side” dish, they’re part of the main attraction, and more often than not they’re the stars of the show. In the West, you can now get decent baak choy, but this is just one of the dozens and dozens of leafy greens that the Chinese regularly consume, many of them practically impossible to find outside Asia.
My own favorite is the sublime choy sum. I remember once getting off a transoceanic flight, starving and exhausted, and being offered a bowl of it over plain white rice. The greens had been scalded for a few seconds with boiling water, then tossed around a pan for no more than a minute — just long enough that the leaves were so tender they seemed to dissolve in your mouth, but the stems still held snap and crunch. The seasoning was subtle — maybe a few cloves of garlic, some salt, a splash of wine or vinegar. Just the right amount to bring out the deep, earthy flavors of the vegetable, to somehow make them brighter and more forward, but not to overpower them.2 It was one of the most delicious things I’ve ever eaten. I think I’ll still remember it when I am old.
Did you notice that in the previous paragraph I spent almost as much time describing the texture of the food as its flavor? That’s no coincidence. Of course the Chinese care about flavor, everybody does (except the British, ha ha), but relative to many other culinary traditions the Chinese put a disproportionate emphasis on the texture of their food as well. I’ll once again draw on a bastardized version of the Whorf hypothesis: English is a big language with a lot of borrowings, so we have a correspondingly large number of words for food textures. Imagine explaining to a foreigner the difference between “crunchy” and “crisp”, or between “soft” and “mushy”. That is already more semiotic resolution than most languages have when it comes to the mouthfeel of their food, but Chinese takes it to a whole ‘nother level.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: Invitation to a Banquet by Fuchsia Dunlop”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-02-05.
- One of them, potatoes, has a particularly fraught history. Potatoes started seriously spreading in China right around the time of the mass famines that accompanied the collapse of the Ming dynasty. Accordingly, they got a reputation of being food for poor people. They’ve never really managed to overcome this association, and are generally shunned by the Chinese, especially in high-end cuisine, despite several government campaigns to encourage people to eat them since they’re nutritious and easy to grow in arid conditions.
- There’s a pattern in Chinese gastronomy where extremely intense, over-the-top flavors are a bit low-status, and flavors so pure and subtle they verge on bland are what the snooty people go for. This is true across regions (the in-your-face food of Sichuan is less valued than the cuisine of the Cantonese South, or the cooking traditions of Zhejiang in the East), but it’s also true within regions (in Sichuan, the food of Chongqing is much spicier than the food of Chengdu, and correspondingly lower status).
March 4, 2026
Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints
Like many, I’ve heard of Jean Raspail’s novel The Camp of the Saints but I’ve never seen a copy of it for sale and I certainly haven’t actually read it myself. At Postcards From Barsoom, John Carter discusses a rare thing: a newly translated printing of the book that iscurrently available for sale:
To call The Camp of the Saints prescient undersells it. At times, Raspail seems to be downright prophetic. Pope Benedict XVI plays a prominent role (albeit this is a character who could not be more different from Cardinal Ratzinger). Raspail also correctly predicted that Rhodesia would become Zimbabwe, which may have been easily foreseeable when Raspail was composing the work but still did not formally happen until 1980, seven years after the novel’s publication; while Raspail was writing, the Rhodesian Bush War was still in full swing. The Rhodies fought until the bitter end to prevent the breadbasket of Africa from being turned into Africa’s basketcase.
The Camp of the Saints is sometimes described as a dystopian novel, which should be read alongside 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, Slaughterhouse 5, and C. S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength. There’s something to be said for this interpretation. You get a pretty good description of the modern world with the Venn diagram overlap of the total state’s panoptic tyranny, the flattening of the human spirit into a mass-produced Last Man via the endless consumption of mass-produced trivial amusements, the death of literary curiosity, the imposition of forced egalitarianism, demon-worshipping transhumanist technocracy, and Raspail’s civilizational collapse via obsequious moral inversion.
Like every good dystopia, however, The Camp of the Saints is first and foremost a satire of the modern world, a warning about where things will head if certain sociopolitical trends are taken to their natural conclusion. Raspail’s work does not take place in some science-fictional near future, as the majority of other dystopias do: its world is technologically and politically indistinguishable from the world Raspail lived in, and still all too recognizable to us. It has been derided as a far-right racist tract, and Raspail’s depiction of the third world horde that subsumes the West is far from flattering, but his venom is directed primarily at the West’s own spineless cultural thought-leaders and political elites, who he identifies as the true and only possible architects of the world-historic catastrophe that he predicts.
The Camp of the Saints also has all the key tropes of a zombie apocalypse story.
The third world horde is depicted as a vast, ravenous, mindless beast comprised of individual members who are not at all fearsome or intimidating, but which triumphs through sheer numbers and slow but relentless advance, and which is defended by its revolting appearance and overpowering, nauseating stench. The migrants are the most wretched products of the slums of Calcutta, malnourished and sickly, afflicted by every kind of congenital defect, infectious disease, infirmity, and skin infection. Their leader is a monstrous, drooling idiot dwarf with lidless eyes, a toothless sphincter for a mouth, and stumps for limbs, who rides about on the shoulders of a giant coprophage. They make their way from India packed like human sardines in a fleet of rusting, dilapidated plague ships, wallowing their way towards Europe through the nauseating miasma that arises from the swamp of corpse-littered shit that they leave in their wake, spending their days listlessly staring out to sea and mindlessly copulating amidst their own putrifying filth. Merely to look upon the migrant horde is to be transfixed with a kind of a religious terror, overcome by its ugliness, paralyzed by pity. Soldiers forced to take even the smallest of aggressive actions against the horde, with only a few exceptions, throw down their weapons and run, not because they are terrified of the horde itself, but because they are terrified of their own conscience should they strike down a defenseless, pitiable wretch. In a few cases, soldiers take their own lives after being made to shoot. The horde’s primary weapon is the crushing psychological pressure that slams down on the souls all who behold it; better to give up and accept the inevitable than suffer the torment of fighting against it.
When the horde encounters a westerner, one of two things happens. Either the westerner is immediately killed by being trampled underfoot or torn limb from limb, or he is smoothly assimilated into the horde, becoming by and by indistinguishable from the innumerable wretches that comprise it. The zombies either eat you, or turn you into a zombie. Women of course are assimilated by rape.
Not everyone succumbs right away, of course. At the end of the novel a small group of psychologically resilient Frenchmen led by an army colonel and a right-wing government minister fall back to an abandoned mountain village. Inside the village’s borders they establish a micocosm of the old, pre-invasion French civilization. They defend their redoubt simply by shooting any migrants or white “assimilates” (as they immediately take to calling them) who get too close. The migrants and assimilates are easily seen, a constant presence shambling in the distance; they are just as easily picked off, being slow and unarmed, and the village’s inhabitants soon take to treating the hunt as a sport. Of course this refuge does not last long: the French air force, in what is implied to be its last act (for the new world will not be able to maintain airplanes) wipes the last surviving Frenchmen out in an airstrike. Racism can’t be tolerated, you see.
Finally, there are the delusional lunatics who imagine that they can befriend or master the horde, turning it to their own purposes or making common cause with it, and who are therefore instrumental in opening the gates to their and everyone else’s doom. Upon actually encountering the horde the madmen find only death or assimilation; the horde is utterly indifferent to any expression of friendship.
February 28, 2026
QotD: The “Balance of Terror” in the missile age
This also meant that a devastating nuclear “first strike” could now be delivered before an opponent would know it was coming, or at least on extremely short notice. A nuclear power could no longer count on having enough warning to get its nuclear weapons off before the enemy’s nuclear strike had arrived. Bernard Brodie grappled with these problems in Strategy in the Missile Age (1959) but let’s focus on a different theorist, Albert Wohlstetter, also with the RAND Corporation, who wrote The Delicate Balance of Terror (1958) the year prior.
Wohlstetter argued that deterrence was not assured, but was in fact fragile: any development which allowed one party to break the other’s nuclear strike capability (e.g. the ability to deliver your strike so powerfully that the enemy’s retaliation was impossible) would encourage that power to strike in the window of vulnerability. Wohstetter, writing in the post-Sputnik shock, saw the likelihood that the USSR’s momentary advantage in missile technology would create such a moment of vulnerability for the United States.
Like Brodie, Wohlstetter concluded that the only way to avoid being the victim of a nuclear first strike (that having the enemy hit you with their nukes) was being able to credibly deliver a second strike. This is an important distinction that is often misunderstood; there is a tendency to read these theorists (Dr. Strangelove does this to a degree and influences public perception on this point) as planning for a “winnable” nuclear war (and some did, just not these fellows here), but indeed the point is quite the opposite: they assume nuclear war is fundamentally unwinnable and to be avoided, but that the only way to avoid it successfully is through deterrence and deterrence can only be maintained if the second strike (that is, your retaliation after your opponent’s nuclear weapons have already gone off) can be assured. Consequently, planning for nuclear war is the only way to avoid nuclear war – a point we’ll come back to.
Wohlstetter identifies six hurdles that must be overcome in order to provide a durable, credible second strike system – and remember, it is the perception of the system, not its reality that matters (though reality may be the best way to create perception). Such systems need to be stable in peacetime (and Wohlstetter notes that stability is both in the sense of being able to work in the event after a period of peace, but also such that they do not cause unintended escalation; he thus warns against, for instance, just keeping lots of nuclear-armed bombers in the air all of the time), they must be able to survive the enemy’s initial nuclear strikes, it must be possible to decide to retaliate and communicate that to the units with the nuclear weapons, then they must be able to reach enemy territory, then they have to penetrate enemy defenses, and finally they have to be powerful enough to guarantee that whatever fraction do penetrate those defenses are powerful enough to inflict irrecoverable damage.
You can think of these hurdles as a series of filters. You start a conflict with a certain number of systems and then each hurdle filters some of them out. Some may not work in the event, some may be destroyed by the enemy attack, some may be out of communication, some may be intercepted by enemy defenses. You need enough at the end to do so much damage that it would never be worth it to sustain such damage.
This is the logic behind the otherwise preposterously large nuclear arsenals of the United States and the Russian Federation (inherited from the USSR). In order to sustain your nuclear deterrent, you need more weapons than you would need in the event because you are planning for scenarios in which some large number of weapons are lost in the enemy’s first strike. At the same time, as you overbuild nuclear weapons to counter this, you both look more like you are planning a first strike and your opponent has to estimate that a larger portion of their nuclear arsenal may be destroyed in that (theoretical) first strike, which means they too need more missiles.
What I want to note about this logic is that it neatly explains why nuclear disarmament is so hard: nuclear weapons are, in a deterrence scenario, both necessary and useless. Necessary, because your nuclear arsenal is the only thing which can deter an enemy with nuclear weapons, but that very deterrence renders the weapons useless in the sense that you are trying to avoid any scenario in which you use them. If one side unilaterally disarmed, nuclear weapons would suddenly become useful – if only one side has them, well, they are the “absolute” weapon, able to make up for essentially any deficiency in conventional strength – and once useful, they would be used. Humanity has never once developed a useful weapon they would not use in extremis; and war is the land of in extremis.
Thus the absurd-sounding conclusion to fairly solid chain of logic: to avoid the use of nuclear weapons, you have to build so many nuclear weapons that it is impossible for a nuclear-armed opponent to destroy them all in a first strike, ensuring your second-strike lands. You build extra missiles for the purpose of not having to fire them.
(I should note here that these concerns were not the only things driving the US and USSR’s buildup of nuclear weapons. Often politics and a lack of clear information contributed as well. In the 1960s, US fears of a “missile gap” – which were unfounded and which many of the politicians pushing them knew were unfounded – were used to push for more investment in the US’s nuclear arsenal despite the United States already having at that time a stronger position in terms of nuclear weapons. In the 1970s and 1980s, the push for the development of precision guidance systems – partly driven by inter-agency rivalry in the USA and not designed to make a first strike possible – played a role in the massive Soviet nuclear buildup in that period; the USSR feared that precision systems might be designed for a “counter-force” first strike (that is a first strike targeting Soviet nuclear weapons themselves) and so built up to try to have enough missiles to ensure survivable second strike capability. This buildup, driven by concerns beyond even deterrence did lead to absurdities: when the SIOP (“Single Integrated Operational Plan”) for a nuclear war was assessed by General George Lee Butler in 1991, he declared it, “the single most absurd and irresponsible document I had ever reviewed in my life”. Having more warheads than targets had lead to the assignment of absurd amounts of nuclear firepower on increasingly trivial targets.)
All of this theory eventually filtered into American policy making in the form of “mutually assured destruction” (initially phrased as “assured destruction” by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in 1964). The idea here was, as we have laid out, that US nuclear forces would be designed to withstand a first nuclear strike still able to launch a retaliatory second strike of such scale that the attacker would be utterly destroyed; by doing so it was hoped that one would avoid nuclear war in general. Because different kinds of systems would have different survivability capabilities, it also led to procurement focused on a nuclear “triad” with nuclear systems split between land-based ICBMs in hardened silos, forward-deployed long-range bombers operating from bases in Europe and nuclear-armed missiles launched from submarines which could lurk off an enemy coast undetected. The idea here is that with a triad it would be impossible for an enemy to assure themselves that they could neutralize all of these systems, which assures the second strike, which assures the destruction, which deters the nuclear war you don’t want to have in the first place.
It is worth noting that while the United States and the USSR both developed such a nuclear triad, other nuclear powers have often seen this sort of secure, absolute second-strike capability as not being essential to create deterrence. The People’s Republic of China, for instance, has generally focused their resources on a fewer number of systems, confident that even with a smaller number of bombs, the risk of any of them striking an enemy city (typically an American city) would be enough to deter an enemy. As I’ve heard it phrased informally by one western observer, a strategy of, “one bomb and we’ll be sure to get it to L.A.” though of course that requires more than one bomb and one doubts the PRC phrases their doctrine so glibly (note that China is, in theory committed to developing a triad, they just haven’t bothered to actually really do so).
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Nuclear Deterrence 101”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-03-11.
February 27, 2026
Footfall and Cultural Blindspots
Feral Historian
Published 24 Oct 2025Niven and Pournelle’s tale is one of the classics of the alien invasion genre and is deserving of more attention these days than it gets. Space elephants, asteroid strikes, and Orion battleships. Let’s get to it.
This one has been sitting in the WiP folder since early spring. There’s not much Footfall art out there and for whatever reason … I can’t seem to draw elephants.
00:00 Intro
03:25 The Herd(s)
07:13 The Foot and Michael
10:13 Flushing the Story
12:33 Launch and Negotiations
15:50 Takeaways
18:06 Rounding Corners
(more…)
QotD: American cultural regions
Colin Woodard, by contrast, assigned himself the far more ambitious task of tracing the history of all America’s regional cultures, from their various foundings right up to the present, and he does about as good a job as anyone could with a mere 300 pages of text at his disposal: it’s necessarily condensed, but the notes are good and he does provide an excellent “Suggested Reading” essay at the end to point you towards thousands of pages worth of places to look when you inevitably want more of something. Intrigued by the brief discussion of the patchwork of regional cultures across Texas? There’s a book for that! Several, in fact.
Woodard divides the US into eleven distinctive regional cultures, which he calls “nations” because they share a common culture, language, experience, symbols, and values. For the period of earliest settlement this seems fairly uncontroversial — you don’t need to read a lot of American history to pick up on the profound cultural differences between, say, the Massachusetts townships that produced John Adams and the Virginia estates of aristocrats like Washington, Jefferson, and Madison, let alone the backwoods shanties where Andrew Jackson grew up. As the number of immigrants increased, though (and this began quite early: several enormous waves of German immigrants meant that by 1755 Pennsylvania no longer had an English majority), it doesn’t seem immediately obvious that the original culture would continue to dominate.
Woodard’s response to this concern is twofold. First, he cites Wilbur Zelinsky’s Doctrine of First Effective Settlement to the effect that “[w]henever an empty territory undergoes settlement, or an earlier population is dislodged by invaders, the specific characteristics of the first group able to effect a viable, self-perpetuating society are of crucial significance for the later social and cultural geography of the area, no matter how tiny the initial band of settlers may have been”. (The nation of New Netherland, founded by the Dutch in the area that is now greater New York City, is the paradigmatic example: both Zelinksy and Woodard argue that it has maintained its distinctively tolerant, mercantile, none-too-democratic character despite the fact that only about 0.2% of the population is now of Dutch descent.)3 But his second, and more convincing, approach is just to show you that the people who moved here in 1650 were like that and then in the 1830s their descendants moved there and kept being like that and, hey look, let’s check in on them today — yep, looks like they’re still like that. Even though between 1650 and now plenty of Germans (or Swedes or Italians or whoever) have joined the descendants of those earliest English settlers.
Most of the book is given over to the six nations — Yankeedom, New Netherland, the Midlands, Tidewater, the Deep South, and Greater Appalachia — that populated the original Thirteen Colonies and still occupy most of the country’s area. Told as the story of the distrust or open bloody conflicts between various peoples, American history takes on a ghastly new cast: have you ever heard of the Yankee-Pennamite Wars, fought between Connecticut settlers and bands of Scots-Irish guerillas over control of northern Pennsylvania? Or the brutal Revolution-era backcountry massacres committed not by the Continental Army or the redcoats but by warring groups of Appalachian militias? What about the fact that Pennsylvania’s commitment to the American cause was made possible only by a Congressionally-backed coup d’état that suspended habeas corpus, arrested anyone opposed to the war, made it illegal to speak or write in opposition to its decisions, and confiscated the property of anyone who suspected of disloyalty (if they weren’t executed outright)? Gosh, this is beginning to sound like, well, literally any other multiethnic empire in history. (It also offers some fascinating points of divergence for alternate history.)4
Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: American Nations, by Colin Woodard”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-02-19.
- Including plenty of Jane Psmith-bait like discussion of who was into boiling (the East Anglians who adopted coal early and moved to New England) vs. roasting (the rich of southern England who could afford wood and moved to the Chesapeake Bay), discussions of regional vernacular architecture, the distinctive sexual crimes each group obsessed about (bestiality in New England, illegitimacy in Chesapeake) and so on — I love this book.
- Incidentally, if you’ve only read Scott Alexander’s review of Albion’s Seed, do yourself a favor and read the actual book. Yes, Scott gives a perfectly cromulent summary of the main points, but it’s a such gloriously rich book, full of so many stories and details and painting such a picture of each of the peoples and places it treats, that settling for the summary is like reading the Wikipedia article about The Godfather instead of just watching the darn movie.
- Yes, there is a book for this, and it’s apparently Russell Shorto’s The Island at the Center of the World, which I have not read and don’t particularly plan to.
- Off the top of my head:
- The Deep South tried to get the United States to conquer and colonize Cuba and much of the Caribbean coast of Central America as future slave states;
- There were a wide variety of other secession movements in the run-up to the Civil War, including a suggestion that New York City should become an independent city-state that was taken seriously enough for the Herald to publish details of the governing structure of the Hanseatic League;
- In 1784 the residents of what is now eastern Tennessee formed the sovereign State of Franklin, which banned lawyers, doctors, and clergymen from running for office and accepted apple brandy, animal skins, and tobacco as legal tender. They were two votes away from being accepted as a state by the Continental Congress.
February 25, 2026
QotD: The notion of “history”
We are closer in time to them than they were to the men who built the Pyramids — by a long shot — and think about that for a second. That’s the vast scope of merely literate human history. Human settlement itself goes back at least another 6,000 years before that, and probably a lot longer.
So far as we can tell, well into historical time men had no real conception of “the past”. Even those men who had recently died weren’t really gone, and again I find Jaynes useful here, but he’s not necessary; it’s obvious by funeral customs alone. They had a basic notion of change, but it was by definition cyclical — the sun rises and sets, the moon goes through its phases, the stars move, the seasons change, but always in an ordered procession. What once was will always return; what is will pass away, but always to return again.
Linear time — the sense of time as a stream, rather than a cycle; the idea that the “past” forecloses possibilities that will never return — only shows up comparatively late in literate history. Hesiod wrote somewhere between 750 and 650 BC; his was the first work to describe a Golden Age as something that might’ve actually existed (as opposed to the Flood narratives of the ancient Middle East).
Note that this is not yet History — that would have to wait another 300 years or so. Whereas a Thucydides could say, with every freshman that has ever taken a history class, that “We study the past so that we don’t make the same mistakes”, that would’ve been meaningless to Hesiod — we can’t imitate the men of the Golden Age, because they were a different species of man.
Note also that Thucydides could say “Don’t make the mistakes of the past” because “the past” he was describing was “the past” of currently living men — he was himself a participant in the events he was describing “historically”.
The notion that the Golden Age could return, or a new era begin, within the lifetime of a living man is newer still. That’s the eschaton proper, and for our purposes it’s explicitly Christian — that is, it’s at most 2000 years old. Christ explicitly promised that some of the men in the crowd at his execution would live to see the end of the world (hence the fun medieval tradition of the Wandering Jew). And since that didn’t happen, you get the old-school, capital-G Gnostics, who interpreted that failure to mean that it was up to us to bring about our own salvation via secret knowledge …
… or, in Europe starting about 1000 AD, you get the notion that it’s up to us to somehow force Jesus to return by killing off all the sinners. I can’t recommend enough Norman Cohn’s classic study The Pursuit of the Millennium if you want the gory details. Cohn served with the American forces denazifying Europe, so he has some interesting speculations along Vogelin’s lines, but for our purposes it doesn’t matter. All we need to do is note that this was in many ways The Last Idea.
Severian, “The Ghosts”, Founding Questions, 2022-05-17.
February 23, 2026
Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire PART TWO
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 27 Aug 2025This should have posted earlier this morning, but for some reason did not.
This is the follow up to last week’s discussion of grand strategy, looking at the reactions and criticisms of Luttwak’s ideas, followed by some of my own thoughts.
February 21, 2026
Books for boys (unlike the vast majority of books for children these days)
Just pointing out that boys and girls have different interests is enough to get you labelled as a right-wing extremist, if not an outright white supremacist/homophobic transphobe. Progressives believe, as a matter of deep conviction, that children are tabula rasa and any indication of interest on their part in male-coded activities is proof of patriarchal brainwashing. This is clearly nonsense, but we’re deep in the propagandized years where even pointing out elements of reality will get you added to terrorist watchlists if it doesn’t actually get you arrested and charged. But boys are interested in different things than girls are and trying to force them to be interested in the things that girls like will almost always turn that boy against whatever you’re trying to shove down his throat.
Boys don’t read as much as girls do, but when almost everything they’re given to read is girl-coded, it makes it even more uninteresting to boys. Yet the tiny minority of books that do appeal to boys are not made available in libraries and schools for fear of somehow leading in the direction of “toxic masculinity” or something.
Among the few publishers who do produce books intended to interest boys is Raconteur Press, who explain here why historical adventure books appeal to boys:
In an era dominated by screens and instant gratification, fostering a deep appreciation for history in young readers can feel like an uphill battle. Yet, historical fiction — especially in the form of thrilling boys’ adventure books — offers a powerful gateway. By weaving real historical events into gripping narratives, these stories not only entertain but also educate, encouraging boys to discover the past, develop essential skills, and cultivate a lifelong love of reading and exploration. Books like A Boy Against the Boxers by Jacob Sharp, Meteor Men by Scott Schad, and Fossil Force by Graham Bradley, all from Raconteur Press, exemplify this approach. Each integrates historical elements in unique ways, showing how adventure can transform history from dry facts into vivid, relatable experiences.
Discovery and Learning Through Historical Events
Historical fiction immerses young readers in the past, making abstract events tangible and personal. By placing protagonists in real-world scenarios, these books help boys “live” history, fostering empathy and understanding that textbooks often lack. For instance, in A Boy Against the Boxers, fourteen-year-old Eddie Donahue is thrust into the heart of the 1900 Boxer Rebellion in Peking (now Beijing). The story draws on actual events like the 55-day Siege of the International Legations, where foreign diplomats and civilians were trapped by anti-Western nationalists. Eddie witnesses martial arts demonstrations, evades violent chases, and participates in scavenging supplies and firing an old black powder cannon known as the “International Gun”. Through Eddie’s eyes, readers learn about the geopolitical tensions of turn-of-the-century China, the unlikely alliances among nations (which would soon fracture in World War I), and the brutal realities of siege warfare. This viewpoint helps boys grasp how ordinary people — much like themselves — navigated chaos, turning history into a lesson in resilience and global interconnectedness.
Similarly, Meteor Men blends scientific discovery with American Civil War history. The five boys — Cinch, Frank, Keith, Joel, and Ronaldo — start as amateur meteorite hunters, using library research and borrowed gadgets like a magnetic probe mounted on a radio-controlled plane. Their quest leads to an unexpected find: a buried Union ironclad riverboat and its Confederate counterpart, solving a fictionalized mystery tied to real Civil War naval battles, such as those on the Mississippi River. Drawing from actual historical markers and artifacts (like the USS Cairo, the only surviving Union armored riverboat), the boys learn about steam-powered warfare, the role of ironclads in river combat, and the human cost of the conflict. From a boy’s perspective, this reveals history as a puzzle to be solved, emphasizing how everyday curiosity can uncover forgotten stories and honor the soldiers who fought.
My own interest in history as a child was nursed by the Ladybird picture books my parents and grandparents bought me (with topics like Alexander the Great, Richard the Lionheart, Henry V, and other interesting-to-boys subjects). One that I still have, in diminished form is a very battered copy of British History in Strip Pictures by James Mainwaring, which must have been published in the late 1950s or early 1960s, as I got it in 1965 and it was already quite battered:
The body of the book got separated from the cover many years ago, and the first few pages got lost, sadly.
It might have been jingoistic “whig history for children”, but I loved it (please pardon the occasional attempts to colour the black-and-white images … I couldn’t help myself at that age):
The Bomber Mafia by Malcolm Gladwell
Based on the few books of his I’d heard of, I wouldn’t have expected Malcolm Gladwell to dip into military history … and from what Secretary of Defense Rock says, it might have been better if Gladwell had steered clear of this particular topic anyway:
I recently received The Bomber Mafia as a gift for my birthday, and it was bad, so bad that I felt compelled to write this review. In so many ways, the book is everything that is wrong with the “pop history” genre: a bestselling author with a massive built-in audience, with a hit podcast to cross-promote the material, and a framing promise to reveal a supposedly “great untold story” about the strategic and moral struggles of American airmen in World War II. The problem in this case is that Gladwell’s narrative about Curtis LeMay, Haywood Hansell, and the evolution of strategic bombing repeatedly collides with the existing scholarship and often ignores it altogether. From his treatment of the raids of Münster and Schweinfurt–Regensburg to his use of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey and his confident claims about what compelled Japan to surrender, The Bomber Mafia exemplifies the worst tendencies of popular history: sweeping pronouncements built on selective reading, caricatured context, and a startling indifference to both primary sources and a vast secondary literature.1
I was only vaguely familiar with Malcolm Gladwell and his work, but for those who don’t know (like me until recently), he has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996, has written a bunch of New York Times bestselling books on sociology, psychology, and economics, and also hosts a very popular podcast called Revisionist History.2 This is all to say he is widely known and already has a big audience that is generally receptive to his projects. The book was originally based on four episodes he did on this topic in July 2020, and then turned into print, so it isn’t so much an actual book as it is a printed podcast.3
Unsurprisingly, both the audiobook and print editions were widely acclaimed upon release. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Yale professor Paul Kennedy praised the book as “a wonderful book”.4 The journalist Michael Lewis described it as “a riveting tale”, while the bestselling biographer Walter Isaacson called it “a wonderful narrative”.5 The book was named a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year and selected as an Editors’ Choice by The New York Times Book Review. It also enjoyed significant commercial success, reaching number two on The New York Times Best Sellers list.6 To promote the book, Gladwell made appearances on Jimmy Kimmel, MSNBC, and CBS’s Sunday Morning show. MSNBC even stated in the segment title that this is “A great untold story”, which is hilarious, given that I don’t know how much ink has been spilled on the strategic bombing campaigns.7
But it should be noted that the book has been criticized by virtually anyone who has seriously studied this topic. Much of the criticism of the book has come from the fact that it hardly focuses on the Japanese and German perspectives, misinterprets why members of the air tactical school focused on precision bombing, and the actual role strategic bombing played in the surrender of Japan.8 All of that is valid, but what was initially more startling to me was how little use was made of primary or secondary sources. So many important works are left out makes me wonder how much research Gladwell even put in.9 To write about strategic bombing in World War II and not include Michael Sherry’s The Rise of American Air Power, Richard Overy’s The Bombing War, Donald Miller’s Masters of the Air, Ken Werrell’s Blankets of Fire or Death From the Heavens, Geoffrey Perrett’s Winged Victory, and barely using any of the official histories is borderline negligence.10 Anyone doing research on strategic bombing and Air Power in World War II almost certainly would have come across these.
- Popular history is a form of historical writing aimed at broad audiences that usually prioritizes storytelling over real scholarship. See Gerald Strauss, “The Dilemma of Popular History,” Past & Present, no. 132 (1991): 130–49, and more recently, Ben Alpers, “The Promise and Perils of Popular History,” Society for U.S. Intellectual History, August 17, 2021.
- The show itself isn’t really a conversation with experts and historians (though they do appear) so much as storytelling.
- I would also preface that I generally don’t have a problem with this premise. There is definitely a segment of the historical profession that dislikes pop history for reasons tied as much to credentials as to content. Much “popular history” is produced by journalists, independent writers, or commentators rather than credentialed academic historians, and that fact alone generates suspicion. In some cases, this skepticism is warranted: weak sourcing, thin engagement with the scholarship, and overconfident claims do real damage. But the problem is not who writes history so much as how it is written. Plenty of non-historians have produced outstanding historical works by taking the craft seriously — immersing themselves in primary sources, engaging honestly with existing scholarship, and resisting the temptation to oversimplify for the sake of narrative punch. Conversely, academic credentials have never been a guarantee for insight or even accuracy. If a writer does the work, respects the evidence, and treats complexity as something to be explained rather than avoided, there is no real reason to dismiss the result simply because of the writer’s background.
- Paul Kennedy, “The Bomber Mafia’ Review: Architects of a Firestorm”, The Wall Street Journal, April 30, 2021.
- Summary of reviews in paperback.
- “Hardcover Nonfiction – May 16, 2021”. The New York Times.
- Malcolm Gladwell: ‘Bomber Mafia’ Looks At A Great Untold Story From WWII.
- Some critical reviews include David Fedman and Cary Karacas, “When Pop History Bombs: A Response to Malcolm Gladwell’s Love Letter to American Air Power”, Los Angeles Review of Books, June 12, 2021; Saul David, “Malcolm Gladwell’s The Bomber Mafia is misleading history-lite”, The Daily Telegraph, April 25, 2021, and Steve Agoratus, Air & Space Power History 68, no. 4 (2021): 52–53.
- This is also coming from a guy who famously wrote that achieving world-class expertise in any field is, to a large extent, a function of accumulating roughly 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, as described in his book Outliers: The Story of Success.
- Gladwell doesn’t really deal with British strategic bombing; there’s just a brief chapter on Arthur Harris. If interested, see Noble Frankland, Bomber Offensive, the Devastation of Europe (New York: Ballantine Books, 1971) Max Hastings, Bomber Command: The Myths and Reality of the Strategic Bombing Offensive, 1939-45 (New York: Dial Press/James Wade, 1979), and Norman Longmate, The Bombers: The RAF Air Offensive against Germany, 1939-1945 (London: Hutchinson, 1983).
February 19, 2026
An American anarchist
I’ve never met Christopher Schwarz, but I’ve read a lot of his writing in books, magazine articles, and blog posts. He’s forgotten more about hand tool woodworking than I’ll ever know, and he’s amazingly generous in sharing his knowledge with others. He calls himself an anarchist, which often puzzles people who only know of anarchism from media-presented bomb-throwing nihilists and conspiratorial Russian stories. Here he explains what he means when he uses the term:
“Chris Schwarz and Meredith Schwarz” by jessamyn west is marked with CC0 1.0 
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I get asked a lot about what I mean by the word “anarchism”, and if I could please explain what I mean when I use that word.
My answer is always unsatisfying. Here’s why.
For the love of creamed corn, why would I publicly discuss ideas that are – for now – a crime in our country? Why would I say – for example – that I think that copyrights and patents on things that use public money are bullshit? That wars are founded on lies? And that the state – in general – seems to be a menace to peaceable living?
That would be stupid. Dumb nuts.
Also, I am a practitioner of anarchism, not a philosopher.
If you want to know more about American anarchism (and aesthetic anarchism, specifically), you need to ask a philosopher, not a front-of-house worker. Read Native American Anarchism (Hachette Books, 1983) by Eunice Minette Schuster for an easy on ramp. Or Josiah Warren’s Equitable Commerce (1852) for the full banana.
The Anarchist’s Tool Chest: Revised Edition by Christopher Schwarz – Link.
Or follow the trail of breadcrumbs left in The Anarchist’s Tool Chest to figure it out yourself. The book describes how to disrupt the furniture industry by building things that never need to be replaced. It’s also about how to jailbreak yourself from a tool industry that offers up aluminum jigs as a substitute for skill.
That book is not the only path. There are other ways to throw a bunch of ball bearings into the guts of the IKEA robots.
Buy antiques or used furniture. The other week I was in Savannah, Georgia, and visited one of my favorite antique stores. The price of handmade antiques has hit bottom. So-called “brown furniture” can be bought for less that the cost of the materials used to make it.
Even though I make furniture for a living, I sometimes save time and money by purchasing vintage industrial furniture for our warehouse, fulfillment center and workshop. Megan’s giant oak desk from the 1960s cost us zero dollars (we just had to move it from an insurance office). Our printer and scanning station? An old workbench from Pennsylvania. Our associate editors’ shared desk? A giant vintage drafting table from Sweden.
And if you think for a moment, there are other industries and organizations that can be farted upon by your actions. The clothing industry is even worse than the furniture industry when it comes to making flimsy crap and abusing workers.
Yes, you can buy ethically made jeans, shirts and socks. Yes, you will pay a premium for these items. And if you can afford that path, great. If you can’t, then buy secondhand clothing.
I’ve always wanted a pair of R.M. Williams boots but could never afford them on a writer’s salary. Last year I found a used pair for about $100 where the owner had ragged out the elastic part of the slip-on boots. It was a stupid easy fix. And now I have boots I shall wear at my funeral.
The other side of the equation is that I’m denying the new-boot-goofin’ industry my dollars. Forever. I don’t have to buy a pair of shoddily made boots that can’t be re-soled and will have to be replaced in a couple years. All my future “boot money” will go to our local cobbler so she can re-sole them every few years.
