As Luttwak notes, modern historians and military theorists have a tendency to sneer at linear defense lines.1 In fact, some historians of ancient Rome actually blame the decline and eventual collapse of the empire on all the “wasted” energy spent building frontier fortifications. The argument against such “cordon” defenses is that for a given quantity of military potential, spreading it out equally along a perimeter and trying to guard every spot equally dilutes your strength. This makes it easy for an attacker (who picks the time and location of the battle) to concentrate his forces, create a local advantage, and break through.
The thing is, approximately none of this logic applied in the Roman situation. First of all, as we’ve already noted, a huge fraction of the threats the Romans faced were “low-intensity”: border skirmishes, slave raids, pirates and brigands, that sort of thing. Static fortifications, walls and towers, are often more than sufficient for dealing with these problems. Paradoxically, that actually increases the mobility and responsiveness of the main forces. If they aren’t constantly running back and forth along the border dealing with bandits, that means they can respond with short notice to “high-intensity” threats (like major invasions and rebellions) that pop up, and are probably better rested and better provisioned when the emergency arrives. So, far from diluting their strength, a lightly-manned series of linear fortifications actually enabled the Romans to concentrate it.
Secondly, those linear fortifications can also be very useful when that major invasion shows up, even if they are overrun. A defense system doesn’t have to be impenetrable in order to still be very, very useful. One thing it can do is buy time, either for the main army to arrive or for some other strategic purpose. The defenses can also act to channel opposing forces into particular well-scouted avenues of attack, or change the calculus of which invasion routes are more and less appealing. Finally, in the process of setting up those defenses, you probably got to know the terrain extremely well, such that when the battle comes you have a tactical advantage.
[…]
The third, and perhaps most important, reason why the Roman frontier fortifications were actually very smart is that they were carefully designed to double as a springboard for invasions into enemy territory. Luttwak coins the term “preclusive defense” to describe this approach. The basic idea is that an army can take bigger risks — pursue a retreating foe, seize a strategic opportunity that might be an ambush, etc. — if it knows that there are strong, prepared defensive lines that it can retreat to nearby. Roman armies were constantly taking advantage of this, and moreover taking advantage of the fact that the system of border fortifications was also a system of roads, supply lines, food and equipment storage depots, and so on. The limes were not a wall that the Romans huddled behind, they were a weapon pointed outwards, magnifying the power that the legions could project, helping them to do more with less.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire by Edward Luttwak”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-11-13.
- I, an ignoramus, assumed this was all downstream of the Maginot line’s bad reputation, but Luttwak says it’s actually the fault of Clausewitz.
February 18, 2026
QotD: Defending the borders of the Roman Empire
February 12, 2026
QotD: Books for children written for “the narrative” instead of for children
C.S. Lewis, the master of escapist fiction, was prophetic in warning against such noxious paternalism from authors. “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive”, he wrote. “It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” Let’s hope Barbie director Greta Gerwig, who has been tapped up to direct the next year’s Chronicles of Narnia series, is taking note.
In the meantime, we have the books, the first of which, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, was published 75 years ago today. When I read this to my son, it transfixed him in a way that all those morally improving Disney and Pixar movies could not — and in a way that I recognised too from my own childhood. The Narnia books are weird and archaic and they are far from comforting. But they leave unanswerable questions and imaginative territory to roam for a lifetime.
What would compel a child to climb into a claustrophobic wardrobe, full of moth-eaten coats and spiders, as apt a symbol as any for the human psyche? C.S. Lewis knew all too well. There are real and terrible things to escape from. And the land of magic, mystery and hope that Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy arrived in would soon reveal that it too was blighted. By facing up to this, conquering its climate of terror, the child would become an adult. If they didn’t pass into the dark and through it, they would remain infantilised.
This partly explains the backlash against Lewis. Two years ago, it was reported that the Government’s counter-terrorism unit, Prevent, had classified his works along with some by his friend J.R.R. Tolkien as potentially leading to “radicalisation”: the kind of wormtongue deception worthy of the villains of Narnia or Middle Earth. It demonstrates that, at its best, fantasy can be the mirror that shows us who we are and what we’ve become. But then, there is a long history of people taking leave of their senses when it comes to Narnia. The books have been banned in the US for being both too Christian and not Christian enough. One critic ranked the books (with delicious venom) as worse than 120 Days of Sodom or Mein Kampf. Being shot by all sides might indicate a writer is on the right track.
For his part, Lewis lambasted “those who do not wish children to be frightened […] Since it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise, you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.” He knew of the existence of shadows from early in life. There is a spine-chilling passage in his memoir, Surprised by Joy, in which he recalls waking up one night with toothache when he was 10. He called out his mother’s name and she did not come. She was dying in another room. His father was never the same and sent Lewis off to a boarding school run by a deranged sadist. “With my mother’s death, all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life.”
As a result, Lewis developed a fear and mistrust of the adult world in those years — and it was well-placed. Scarcely more than a boy, Lewis was sent to the trenches. He was seriously injured in the Battle of Arras (he would have shrapnel, from a shell that obliterated a colleague, embedded permanently in his body) and, like Tolkien, he watched many of his friends die. “One cannot help wondering why,” he wrote to his father.
Darran Anderson, “Save Narnia from the woke witch”, UnHerd, 2025-10-15.
Update, 13 February: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
February 9, 2026
Why This Is The Greatest Lord Of The Rings Scene Ever
The Critical Drinker
Published 6 Feb 2026Since its the 25th anniversary of the trilogy, I figured I’d reminisce about my favourite ever scene from all three movies. And explain why I’m objectively right about it.
QotD: The pre-modern versus the modern concept of “self”
In contrast, most modern societies believe in a self that is “buffered”. In this view there are a few limited, low-bandwidth ways that the external world can act on one’s innate nature, for instance via drugs or other body chemistry, and even these are often seen as revealing or disclosing previously hidden innate characteristics of one’s personality rather than as imposing something alien. Taylor argues quite convincingly that these two ways of viewing the self — porous vs. buffered — inexorably produce two different ways of viewing society and the world: premodern and modern. For example: if selves are porous, then we need to be extremely vigilant against the invasion or violation of our minds by hostile spirits, and we must be suspicious of what we want, because it might not really be what we want, but rather what something else wants through us. Conversely, if selves are buffered then our desires are just part of who we are, and in order to be true to ourselves, we need to explore them and act upon them.
It may have been reasonable to believe in a buffered self back in the days before the internet, but recent developments have made it clear that (as in so many things) the primitive superstitions were actually correct, and the enlightened modern view was just a lamer and dumber kind of superstition.1 Science fiction has long been fascinated with stories of infohazards — images or jokes or snippets of cognition that act like a Gödel sentence for the human mind and leave people braindead or mind-controlled. But such things long since slipped the shackles of fiction — we now have internet creepypasta that induces girls to become murderers and a genre of pornography that turns boys into girls.2 The noösphere is a vast ocean, and its abyssal depths teem with lifeforms and thoughtforms that seek to possess you and live out their blasphemous unlife through your mortal husk.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: Demons, by Fyodor Dostoevsky”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-07-17.
- Or maybe society is already correcting itself on this point. Many like to make fun of the “fragility” and “snowflake” nature of Gen Z, and I’ve argued before that these critics miss the point that they’re actually being “flexed on” (in the parlance of our times) because loudly asserting an exaggerated harm is a power move (think: upper class women in an honor culture claiming to feel threatened, and how that’s actually itself a threat).
But here’s a different take on it: maybe “trauma” as it’s popularly conceptualized is actually modernity groping its way back to a porous understanding of the self! We no longer believe in spirits or curses, but our psyches are self-evidently susceptible to immaterial external influence, so we create a new concept that aligns empirical psychic porosity with the dominant metaphysical and ideological currents.
- I had a long debate with myself on whether to include either of those links. Do I really want to expose more people to an infohazard? Ultimately I decided to do it because this stuff is already so widespread. In both cases I’ve linked to a page that links to the subject matter in question rather than linking directly, so you have one more chance to bail out.
February 7, 2026
The Probability Broach: L. Neil Smith’s libertarian fever-dream
Feral Historian
Published 6 Feb 2026Equal parts political manifesto and wacky adventure story, The Probability Broach is usually not the first title people think of when they hear “libertarian sci-fi” but it almost always makes the list after further reflection. While ideologically-motivated fiction tends to preach more than entertain, L. Neil Smith makes his world so bonkers and whimsical that we almost can’t help seeing our own in a similar light, and in so doing reminds us that things are as they are ultimately because we chose to make it this way.
There’s some jumpcuts in this due to lack of good b-roll, but I suspect that most people who make it past the half-way point on this one are just listening anyway.
The artwork is from the graphic novel adaptation from Big Head Press https://www.bigheadpress.com/tpbtgn
I ordered a copy but the government-run postal system didn’t get it to me in time to use its illustrations of later chapters.00:00 Intro
01:05 The Setup
03:15 Whiskey Rebellion
05:36 Confederacy
07:50 Property, Culture, and Capitalism
15:01 Cultural Assumptions
19:20 Interventionism
21:04 Choices, not Systems
(more…)
February 5, 2026
The Mote in God’s Eye: A No-Win Scenario
Feral Historian
Published 26 Sept 2025For whatever reason books by [Larry] Niven and [Jerry] Pournelle always end up being a lot harder to cover than I expect. It’s not that the core ideas are buried in dense convoluted storytelling or unusually compelling characters (often quite the opposite) but rather I think that the core ideas are always a little uncomfortable to face head-on. And Mote is great example.
Niven and Pournelle create a scenario not only of the cyclical rise and fall of a civilization, but one that through a combination of biological and cultural factors points to the impossibility of long-term coexistence between Humanity and the Moties.
00:00 Intro
01:26 Aristocracy and Contact
04:11 The Moties
08:48 Crazy Eddie
10:18 The Middle Path?
12:53 The Gripping Hand
(more…)
January 30, 2026
QotD: Slavery in the Islamic world
The widespread neglect of the history of slavery in North Africa and the Middle East, which Captives and Companions seeks to redress, partly reflects a culture of American exceptionalism; slavery in other parts of the Americas (it was abolished in Brazil only in 1888) also receives little attention.
Partly, too, it reflects a tradition of denial in the Islamic world itself. Marozzi recalls a professor at Bilkent University in Turkey admonishing a younger historian not to dig too deep: “Our ancestors treated their slaves very well; don’t waste your time”.
In the West, meanwhile, Islamic slavery is an unfashionable — and often suspect — subject: one is reminded of West Germany in the 1980s, when any overemphasis on Soviet crimes against humanity could appear as an attempt to whitewash or relativise the Holocaust. Marozzi is careful not to dwell too much on comparisons between Islamic and Atlantic slavery, except as regards the scholarly attention which they have received. Still, many readers will pick up his book hungry for such comparisons. So here they are.
In both Islamic and Atlantic slavery there was a marked racial — anti-black — component. Slavery was sustained by similar religious and philosophical justifications: the biblical “curse of Ham”, for example, and the idea that geography and climate made sub-Saharan Africans naturally suited for servitude. “Chattel slavery”, Marozzi emphasises, existed in the Islamic world too. Both involved horrific violence and displacement. Both were complex and sophisticated enterprises, often with serious money at stake.
People have always been hesitant to draw any comparisons between Islamic and Atlantic slavery, albeit often for entirely opposite reasons to historians today. Whereas the Jewish-American writer Mordecai Manuel Noah was a vocal supporter of the enslavement of Africans in America, he was also bitterly opposed to the enslavement of Americans in North Africa — and therefore a strong supporter of America’s involvement in the Barbary wars.
Gladstone, meanwhile, thought that Turks killing and enslaving Europeans was far worse than “negro slavery”, which had at least involved “a race of higher capacities ruling over a race of lower capacities”. However dubious his family connections, Gladstone was born after Britain had abolished the slave trade.
The lack of attention given to Islamic slavery is all the more dismaying when one considers just how much longer it survived.
Most of slavery’s 20th century holdouts were in the Islamic world. Iran abolished slavery in 1928; Yemen and Saudi Arabia in 1962; Turkey — which we like to consider more “Western” than the others — in 1964. Mauritania half-heartedly abolished slavery in 1981. Slavery was still a feature of elite life in Zanzibar as late as 1970. When 64-year-old President Karume took an underage Asian concubine, he justified it by declaring that “in colonial times the Arabs took African concubines … now the shoe is on the other foot”.
The Royal Harem in Morocco, meanwhile, was only dissolved on the death of Hassan II in 1999. In the Islamic world, human beings were bought and sold, and forced to do demeaning and painstaking labour, within living memory; some people languish there still.
The key difference between Atlantic and Islamic slavery concerned status. Slaves in the Islamic world could rise to high places: 35 of the 37 Abbasid caliphs were born to enslaved concubine mothers; the slave eunuch Abu al Misk Kafur was regent over Egypt from 946 to 968. Slave dynasties, most notably the Mamluks, were amongst the most powerful in the Islamic world.
The polyglot governor of Hong Kong, Sir John Bowring, when he inveighed against “slavery in the Mohamedan states”, had no choice but to acknowledge that a slave in the East could attain the “highest social elevation” — a far cry from the black slaves of the West Indies. Some slaves, too, were amongst the worthies of Islam, such as the first Muslim martyr, Sumayya bint Khabat.
Slavery occupied a complex place in Islamic law. The Quran, on the one hand, permits men to have sex with female slaves. But on the other, the emancipation of slaves is smiled upon as one of the noblest things a Muslim can do. The Abyssinian slave Bilal ibn Rabah was freed by Abu Bakr and became the first caller to prayer; another freed slave, Zayd ibn Haritha, was briefly the Prophet’s adopted son.
The Quran also expressly forbids Muslims from enslaving fellow Muslims. Nonetheless, as Marozzi shows, this prohibition has not always been strictly observed. The Mahdi (of General Gordon fame) claimed to represent pure, Islamic orthodoxy, but he had no qualms about enslaving Muslim Turks.
Likewise, it mattered little that the Prophet Muhammad had explicitly forbidden castration of male slaves. For over a millennium his tomb in Medina was guarded by a corps of eunuchs. This, too, was an institution which survived into living memory: in 2022 a Saudi newspaper reported that there remained one living eunuch guardian.
Samuel Rubinstein, “The dirty secret of the Muslim world”, The Critic, 2025-10-17.
January 29, 2026
Starship Troopers: Service Isn’t The Point
Feral Historian
Published 5 Sept 2025There’s a long-running argument over whether Heinlein’s book describes military service as the exclusive path to citizenship, or if “federal service” is a much broader basket of enfranchisement. While a close read of the book makes it unquestionably clear which is correct, it misses the greater point. Heinlein was writing about the role of civic virtue in the stability of a republic, his citizenship-through-service framing is the literary conceit for discussing that larger question.
For a more detailed examination of the nature of Federal Service, I recommend James Gifford’s essay on the subject: https://www.nitrosyncretic.com/rah/ft…
00:00 Intro
00:45 What is Federal Service?
02:18 An Exploration of Enfranchisement
03:13 Expanded Universe
05:38 But Why?
06:59 Starside R&D
09:07 “Unreasonable Facsimile”
10:54 Filtering Civic Virtue
(more…)
January 25, 2026
QotD: Dostoevsky’s views on revolutionaries in Demons
Does that seem unrealistic? That ringleader was actually based on a real life student revolutionary named Sergey Nechayev, whose trial Dostoevsky eagerly followed. Nechayev wrote a manifesto called The Catechism of a Revolutionary, here’s an excerpt from that charming document:
The revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no personal interests, no business affairs, no emotions, no attachments, no property, and no name. Everything in him is wholly absorbed in the single thought and the single passion for revolution … The revolutionary despises all doctrines and refuses to accept the mundane sciences, leaving them for future generations. He knows only one science: the science of destruction … The object is perpetually the same: the surest and quickest way of destroying the whole filthy order … For him, there exists only one pleasure, one consolation, one reward, one satisfaction – the success of the revolution. Night and day he must have but one thought, one aim – merciless destruction.
The ideas don’t matter, because at the end of the day they’re pretexts for desires — the desire to dominate, the desire to obliterate the world, the desire to obliterate the self, the desire to negate.3 Just as in their parents’ generation the desire for status came first and wrapped itself in liberal politics in order to reproduce and advance itself, so in their children the desire for blood and death reigns supreme, and the radical politics serve only as a mechanism of self-justification and a lever to pull. This is not a novel about people, and it’s also not a novel about ideas. It’s a novel about desires, motives, urges, and the ways in which we construct stories to make sense of them.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: Demons, by Fyodor Dostoevsky”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-07-17.
- To Dostoevsky’s own surprise, when he wrote the main bad guy of the story, he turned out a very funny, almost buffoonish figure. He may be the most evil person in literature who’s also almost totally comic.
- Dostoevsky is notorious for dropping hints via the names of his characters — applied nominative determinism — and this one’s name means something like “supremacy”.
- Or as another famous book about demons once put it:
I am the spirit that negates
And rightly so, for all that comes to be
Deserves to perish wretchedly;
‘Twere better nothing would begin.
Thus everything that your terms, sin,
Destruction, evil represent —
That is my proper element.
January 22, 2026
D’Joan, C’Mell, and the Rediscovery of Man
Feral Historian
Published 29 Aug 2025Cordwainer Smith, through short stories and novellas, tells a sprawling history spanning thousands of years and an entire galaxy. In this one, I’m looking at a single narrative thread of that world, the gulf between man and animal and the partnerships that make humanity whole again after a long span of cultural stagnation and loss of vitality.
00:00 Intro
02:19 Partners and Divisions
05:15 Heading Down to Clown Town
15:53 Mans’ Other Friend
19:22 NorstriliaThe first month’s ad revenue from this video will be donated to 2 animal rescues. https://pauseforpawsaz.com/ and https://sites.google.com/site/catalli…
(more…)
January 20, 2026
Feeding the Great Mongol Khan
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 29 Jul 2025Mastic stew with black rice, spices, and lamb, garnished with cilantro
City/Region: Mongol Empire | China
Time Period: 1330The grandson of Genghis Khan, Kublai Khan doubled the size of the largest land empire the world had ever known by conquering China. We actually know quite a bit about the foods that fueled his empire-expanding efforts. Shortly after his death, Yinshàn zhèngyào, or The Proper and Necessary Things for the Emperor’s Food and Drink, was written, and its recipes include ingredients from across Kublai Khan’s vast empire.
The mastic in this stew is a resin from the mastic tree in the Mediterranean, and it has a bitterness along with cedar or pine notes. I really like it in sweet things, but there is no sugar in this dish. The stew is aromatic and smells of cardamom and cinnamon, but they don’t come through in the flavor. The bitterness of the mastic and the lamb dominate the dish, but Kublai Khan was eating this dish to invigorate his chi, so maybe the flavor didn’t matter as much.
I used black rice, or forbidden rice, so named because supposedly it was only eaten by the emperor and his court for much of Chinese history, and it makes the stew a deep purple. You can use long grain white or brown rice, which will make for a lighter colored dish.
Nourishes, warms the middle and grants chi. Leg of mutton, five tsaoko cardamoms, 2 ch’ien cinnamon, one half sheng chickpeas, mash and remove the skins. Boil the ingredients together to make a soup, strain it. Cut up the meat and set aside. Add 2 ho of cooked chickpeas, 1 sheng of aromatic rice, 1 ch’ien of mastic. Mix well with a little salt. Add chopped meat and cilantro.
— Yinshàn zhèngyào by Hu Sihui, 1330
January 17, 2026
Scott Adams, RIP
Another Scott, Scott Alexander, has a long essay about the career and life of the late comic strip artist, author, and internet personality. When I first encountered his Dilbert comic strip, I was living the cubicle life and far too many of the jokes and situations felt like Adams must be in the same company — possibly even the same department. I read a couple of his non-Dilbert books, but I didn’t follow his work very much after I escaped the cube farm, so reading this essay told me a number of things about Adams that I didn’t already know:
Thanks to everyone who sent in condolences on my recent death from prostate cancer at age 68, but that was Scott Adams. I (Scott Alexander) am still alive.1
Still, the condolences are appreciated. Scott Adams was a surprisingly big part of my life. I may be the only person to have read every Dilbert book before graduating elementary school. For some reason, 10-year-old-Scott found Adams’ stories of time-wasting meetings and pointy-haired bosses hilarious. No doubt some of the attraction came from a more-than-passing resemblance between Dilbert’s nameless corporation and the California public school system. We’re all inmates in prisons with different names.
But it would be insufficiently ambitious to stop there. Adams’ comics were about the nerd experience. About being cleverer than everyone else, not just in the sense of being high IQ, but in the sense of being the only sane man in a crazy world where everyone else spends their days listening to overpaid consultants drone on about mission statements instead of doing anything useful. There’s an arc in Dilbert where the boss disappears for a few weeks and the engineers get to manage their own time. Productivity shoots up. Morale soars. They invent warp drives and time machines. Then the boss returns, and they’re back to being chronically behind schedule and over budget. This is the nerd outlook in a nutshell: if I ran the circus, there’d be some changes around here.
Yet the other half of the nerd experience is: for some reason this never works. Dilbert and his brilliant co-workers are stuck watching from their cubicles while their idiot boss racks in bonuses and accolades. If humor, like religion, is an opiate of the masses, then Adams is masterfully unsubtle about what type of wound his art is trying to numb.
This is the basic engine of Dilbert: everyone is rewarded in exact inverse proportion to their virtue. Dilbert and Alice are brilliant and hard-working, so they get crumbs. Wally is brilliant but lazy, so he at least enjoys a fool’s paradise of endless coffee and donuts while his co-workers clean up his messes. The P.H.B. is neither smart nor industrious, so he is forever on top, reaping the rewards of everyone else’s toil. Dogbert, an inveterate scammer with a passing resemblance to various trickster deities, makes out best of all.
The repressed object at the bottom of the nerd subconscious, the thing too scary to view except through humor, is that you’re smarter than everyone else, but for some reason it isn’t working. Somehow all that stuff about small talk and sportsball and drinking makes them stronger than you. No equation can tell you why. Your best-laid plans turn to dust at a single glint of Chad’s perfectly-white teeth.
Lesser lights may distance themselves from their art, but Adams radiated contempt for such surrender. He lived his whole life as a series of Dilbert strips. Gather them into one of his signature compendia, and the title would be Dilbert Achieves Self Awareness And Realizes That If He’s So Smart Then He Ought To Be Able To Become The Pointy-Haired Boss, Devotes His Whole Life To This Effort, Achieves About 50% Success, Ends Up In An Uncanny Valley Where He Has Neither The Virtues Of The Honest Engineer Nor Truly Those Of The Slick Consultant, Then Dies Of Cancer Right When His Character Arc Starts To Get Interesting.
If your reaction is “I would absolutely buy that book”, then keep reading, but expect some detours.
- As is quantum complexity blogger Scott Aaronson.
At Ace of Spades H.Q., Buck Throckmorton remembers Scott Adams:
Scott Adams’ death is being eloquently covered by others, so there is not much I can add. But I do want to offer up a few quick thoughts. Aside from Dilbert being my favorite cartoon for decades, I was a loyal reader of Mr. Adams’ blog for many years before his greater celebrity during the Trump era. Mr. Adams often expanded my views, and occasionally frustrated me, but he helped me understand how rational people can understand things differently.
Back in 2016, when I doubted that Donald Trump was in any way conservative, and when I thought Trump had no chance to beat Hillary in the presidential election, Scott Adams was one of two writers who made an impact on my attitude toward that election. Mr. Adams famously wrote about the reasons why Trump was likely to win. He was right. (The other writer was John Hinderaker of Powerline, who was the first legacy conservative I read who stated that of course we traditional Republicans needed to vote for Trump.)
I was flattered once when Scott put out a call for Dilbert topics and he ended up using one of my submissions. As I recall, his invitation to the public was something to the effect of “You provide the workplace situation and I’ll provide the humor“. I wrote him and offered up what a special hell it was to be working for a company campaigning for recognition in a local “Best Places to Work” contest. Shortly thereafter he used that in a cartoon.
Finally, my favorite Dilbert character was one who got very little screen time. Scott Adams may be gone, but Mordac, The Preventer of Information Services lives on.
I think of Mordac every time I have a spontaneously obsolete password, or I’m blocked from being able to access a system necessary for my job, or I can’t access an SaaS app because there are too few licenses, or I’m logged out of a system because I got called away for a short meeting, etc. In all these circumstances, I give a tip of the hat to Mordac, and I applaud his success in protecting my employer by preventing me from doing my job.
January 16, 2026
“During the 1990s, the midlist disappeared at major publishing houses”
It’s no secret that the publishing industry has changed substantially — and from most readers’ point of view, for the worse — but when did it happen, and why? Ted Gioia points to the mid-1990s in New York City:
Everybody can see there’s a crisis in New York publishing. Even the hot new books feel lukewarm. Writers win the Pulitzer Prize and sell just few hundred copies. The big publishers rely on 50 or 100 proven authors — everything else is just window dressing or the back catalog.
You can tell how stagnant things have become from the lookalike covers. I walk into a bookstore and every title I see is like this.
They must have fired the design team and replaced it with a lazy bot. You get big fonts, random shapes, and garish colors — again and again and again. Every cover looks like it was made with a circus clown’s makeup kit.
My wife is in a book club. If I didn’t know better, I’d think they read the same book every month. It’s those same goofy colors and shapes on every one.
Of course, you can’t judge a book by its cover. But if you read enough new releases, you get the same sense of familiarity from the stories. The publishers keep returning to proven formulas — which they keep flogging long after they’ve stopped working.
And that was a long time ago.
It’s not just publishing. A similar stagnancy has settled in at the big movie studios and record labels. Nobody wants to take a risk — but (as I’ve learned through painful personal experience) that’s often the riskiest move of them all. Live by the formula, and you die by the formula.
How did we end up here?
It’s hard to pick a day when the publishing industry made its deal with the devil. But an anecdote recently shared by Steve Wasserman is as good a place to begin as any.
He’s describing a lunch with his boss at Random House in the fall of 1995. Wasserman is one of the smartest editors I’ve ever met, and possesses both shrewd judgment and impeccable tastes. So he showed up at that lunch with a solid track record.
But it wasn’t good enough. The publishing industry was now learning a new kind of math. Steve’s boss explained the numbers:
Osnos waited until dessert to deliver the bad news … First printings of ten thousand copies were killing us. It was our obligation to find books that could command first printings of forty, fifty, even sixty thousand copies. Only then could profits be had that were large enough to feed the behemoth — or more precisely, the more refined and compelling tastes — that modern mainstream publishing demanded.
Wasserman countered with infallible logic:
I pointed out, if such a principle were raised to the level of dogma, none of the several books that were then keeping Random House fiscally afloat — Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (eventually spending a record two hundred and sixteen weeks on the bestseller list, and adapted into a film by Clint Eastwood), and Joe Klein’s Primary Colors (published anonymously and made into a movie by Mike Nichols in 1998) — would ever have been acquired. None had been expected to be a bestseller, and each had started out with a ten-thousand copy first printing.
But it was a hopeless cause. And I know because I’ve had similar conversations with editors. And my experience matches Wasserman’s — something changed in the late 1990s.
The old system offered more variety. It took greater risks. It didn’t rely so much on formulas. So it could surprise you.
In a post about the jinned-up anger about CEO pay versus average worker pay, Tim Worstall briefly touches on the plight of writers:
Or even more fun perhaps.
In 2006, median author earnings were £12,330. In 2022, the median has fallen to £7,000, a drop of 33.2% based on reported figures, or 60.2% when adjusted for inflation.
That’s median earnings so 50% of all authors earn less than £7,000. And note this is only among those taking it seriously enough to join the Society of Authors (a number which does not include me). Even at my level of scribbling 5x to 10x, depends upon the year, of those median earnings can be gained.
But top level authors, well, they do earn rather more. No, not thinking of the JK Rowling level of global superstardom. But it would astonish me if Owen Jones is earning less than 50x those median earnings (yes, Guardian column, books, Patreon, YouTube and whatever, £350k would be my lower guess).
Writers display that similar sort of income disparity and range, no? Because we’re not about to suggest that Owen is top rank earning now, are we, even if it is a damn good income there.
Which shows us what is wrong with the Cardiganista’s1 initial calculation. They’re pointing only to the incomes of the very tippy toppy of the income distribution for that job. If we apply the same sort of reasoning to writers or footie players (and it’ll be the same for actors and all sorts of other peeps) we find very similar distributions.
- They all seem to be Guardian retirees and their byline pictures have them wearing cardigans — or did — therefore …
January 15, 2026
QotD: Process knowledge
The tools and IP held by these firms are easy to observe. I think that the process knowledge they possess is even more important. The process knowledge can also be referred to as technical and industrial expertise; in the case of semiconductors, that includes knowledge of how to store wafers, how to enter a clean room, how much electric current should be used at different stages of the fab process, and countless other things. This kind of knowledge is won by experience. Anyone with detailed instructions but no experience actually fabricating chips is likely to make a mess.
I believe that technology ultimately progresses because of people and the deepening of the process knowledge they possess. I see the creation of new tools and IP as certifications that we’ve accumulated process knowledge. Instead of seeing tools and IP as the ultimate ends of technological progress, I’d like to view them as milestones in the training of better scientists, engineers, and technicians.
The accumulated process knowledge plus capital allows the semiconductor companies to continue to produce ever-more sophisticated chips. […] It’s not just about the tools, which any sufficiently-capitalized firm can buy; or the blueprints, which are hard to follow without experience of what went into codifying them.
Process knowledge lives in people, grows when people interact with other people, and spreads around when skilled individuals relocate between cities or companies. But this also means it can wither and die, can be lost forever, either when old workers shuffle off to the Big Open Plan Office in the Sky, or when an ecosystem no longer has the energy or complexity to sustain a critical mass of skilled workers in a particular vocation. Some East Asian societies have gone to extreme lengths to retain process knowledge, for instance by deliberately demolishing and rebuilding a temple every 20 years.
In fact this is far from the most extreme thing East Asian societies have done to retain the process knowledge that lives within their workers! There are some components of an ecosystem, whether natural or technological, that are especially important keystone species. In the technological case, these species can be unprofitable at the current scale of an ecosystem, or inefficient, or they might not make economic sense until one or more of their customers exist, but those customers might not be able to exist until the keystone species does. Venture capital is very practiced at solving this kind of Catch-22, but in the East Asian economic boom it was national governments that actively sheltered keystone industries until they could get their footing, thus making entire ecosystems possible. A wonderful book about this is Joe Studwell’s How Asia Works, but if you can’t read it, read Byrne Hobart’s thorough review instead.
Process knowledge is so powerful, the ecosystem it enables so vital, it can break the assumptions of Ricardo’s theory of trade. Steve Keen has a perceptive essay about how the naive Ricardian analysis treats all capital stock as fungible and neglects the existence of specialized machinery and infrastructure. But naive defenders1 of trade liberalization often make an exactly analogous error with respect to the other factor of production — labor. Workers are not an undifferentiated lump, they are people with skills, connections, and expertise locked up in their heads. When a high-skill industry moves offshore, the community of experts around it begins to break up, which can cripple adjacent industries, stymie insights and breakthroughs, and make it almost impossible to bring that industry back.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: Flying Blind by Peter Robison”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-02-06.
- Like all coastal-Americans, I am generally in favor of trade liberalization, but I’m consummate and sophisticated about it, unlike Noah Smith.
January 9, 2026
QotD: “My goal is to get paid for having fun”
True multi genre authors are rare. I’ve done really well in a bunch of different genres because I’m good at recognizing what people enjoy about those, and then giving them what they want, with my own spin on it. I can tweak it, but I shouldn’t break it.
“What if your childhood heroes are really losers and here’s a new girl boss? OOOOH SO EDGY.” That kind of shit bores me.
Far too many authors are pretentious shit heads who climb up their own ass thinking they need to “subvert” expectations, but they’re really not brilliant enough to pull that off. They’re just crapping on the stuff that made people like those genres to begin with. They’re not nearly as clever as they think they are.
Me? I’m happy to be a pulp hack. If I’m writing epic fantasy, I’m going to do the big, deep, thematic, emotional, stuff (and Saga of the Forgotten Warrior rocks) and if I’m doing progression fantasy then it’s going to be fun and adventure and scrappy nobodies trying to make it in the world and becoming heroes along the way. American Paladin is a dark and gritty vigilante story (with monsters in it). And Monster Hunter is urban fantasy soaked in testosterone and gun oil (that’s next for 2026). I’ve done sci-fi. I’ve done horror. I’ve done comedy. I’ve done thrillers. Hell, I’ve done stuff like Hard Magic where good luck pinning down what the hell genre that is … alternate history, hard boiled, pulp noir, super heroes? Hell if I know.
My goal is to get paid for having fun. 😀
Larry Correia, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-10-08.
