Thinking Out Aloud

Understanding the rise of pastoralist nomads (from the Scythians to the Mongols) is central to understanding the long run patterns of Eurasi...

Alas, Monday was not the day for internet back on at home. Still do not know when. When it is, will blog again more regularly.

So, internet will be back at home on Monday, so should post more regularly after then.

Alfred Crosby has become one of my favourite historians. He writes clear, amusing books to answer a question: how did the West become so gl...

How many Zen monks does it take to change a lightbulb?
Two. One to change it and one not to change it. ( Bones of the Master , p.178) I cam...

Hence the lack of posting. It should all be back up and running on Friday though!

Bruce Bawer’s While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within is a cri d’coeur from an American gay writer who fo...

My housemate has got dumped by his (and therefore my) internet provider for being two months behind paying the bill. So, no internet from h...

I have read a lot over the years about the internal operation of totalitarian societies. So I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to read yet ano...

Several things strike me reading pieces such as Rod Dreher’s arguments against legal equality for same-sex couples . (1) Basing ethics on a ...

It would be wrong to call Beverley Nichols’s memoir of his upbringing, Father Figure , a tale of unremitting horror – that would be unfair t...

Back in August 2007, I went to the MacGeorge Lecture as part of Melbourne University's School of Historical Studies Winter Lecture ser...

War and Peace and War: The Life Cycles of Imperial Nations is a book by a biologist ( Peter Turchin ) who has wandered into history ( a la...

Economists typically divide factors of production into land (the natural means of production), labour (human effort) and capital (the pr...

Hatcher and Bailey’s Modelling the Middle Ages: The History and Theory of England's Economic Development examines the various “supermo...

The following thoughts come from personal experience and reading about mysticism. They are adapted from a letter to a close friend sent in ...

Two excellent books on human bondage are Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom by Peter Kolchin and Nobel Laureate Robert Will...

In my post on Stephanie Cootz’s Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage I noted the results that tertiary educated women are now ...

James Ault’s Spirit and Flesh: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist Church is a book by a sociologist about his study of a fundamentalist Bapti...