"Demography is destiny." This sentence is commonly attributed to the French philosopher August Comte, who many consider to be the father of sociology. He probably never actually said this, but it is, at least, a succinct summation of his argument that the future of a nation's people depends largely...
Tom Nichols PhD was professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College for 25 years. In 2018, he published The Death of Expertise, a book in which he argued that "the increasingly democratic dissemination of information, rather than producing an educated public, has instead...
Trofim Denisovich Lysenko was a Ukrainian agronomist who lived in the Soviet Union. By 1928, he had rejected both Darwin's theory of natural selection and Mendel's theory of genetics. Neither, he declared, were compatible with the tenets of Marxism-Leninism. Lysenko's ideas would've quickly met with...
I noticed today that Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy introduced new legislation: "The National Strategy for Social Connection Act". The Act purports to solve the issue of "loneliness and isolation". Let's leave aside whether we should run screaming in terror at the very idea of the government impos...
With this article, I offer a world-historical hypothesis about why we’re going through such turmoil. I've written this as a companion to the video presentation I linked earlier. Of course, you might not want to sit through an hour and a half of me talking—or rambling—about this. So, while this is a...
I want to continue my examination of the death of the Book Age by looking at the newspaper business model; specifically how unsuited it is for the Information Age. This old business model is killing the newspaper industry. But it also goes beyond that. Newspaper business models are one of the primar...
We live in weird times. In fact we're living in times we haven't experienced since the 15th century. Since 1450, we've lived in the Book Age, which followed the creation of the movable type printing press. But that age is over. We've entered the Information Age, and just like...
The 1970s weren’t just a different time. The United States itself was a far different place. A much stranger place. Just take a look at these ads, which, at the time, seemed entirely normal. Because we were high as a kite.
Keep in mind that these weren’t weird little ads in alternative newspapers....