Ken Burns’s The War

The fall of the United States?

From the Guardian: Decline and fall of the American Empire Key passage: “Let me put an alternative hypothesis. America in 2011 is Rome in 200AD or Britain on the eve of the first world war: an empire at the zenith of its power but with cracks beginning to show. The experience of both Rome and […]

On the Price of Corn and Management of the Poor, November 1766

Ben Franklin, November 1766 I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I traveled much, and I observed […]

Jordan Peterson’s Forward to the 50th Anniversary of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Epic ‘The Gulag Archipelago’

The three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago — one continuous, extended scream of outrage — are, paradoxically, brilliant, bitter, disbelieving and infused with awe: awe at the strength characterising the best among us, in the worst of all situations. In that monumental text, published in 1973, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn conducted “an experiment in literary investigation” — a hybrid […]