Veteran AF

Fifty Years Ago Brigade 76 Reinforced Europe

2026-10-25T10:27:03.035-04:00

Fifty years ago in October the four thousand soldiers of Brigade 76 flew from Colorado Springs to Frankfurt. We climbed into fully combat loaded tanks with 63 live cannon rounds and drove to the East-West border at Fulda.

Tensions with the Soviet Union led the US to send more troops to West Germany and show the Soviet Union our commitment to NATO and Europe. Just 15 years later, against all expectations, the Soviet Union collapsed. Of the four wars I served in or during, the Cold War is the only win.

Which makes Trump's love of Putin that much more horrible. He betrays our allies, Ukraine most of all, and support a truly, deeply genocidal war to erase Ukraine. Glory to Ukraine.

Patrick Deneen, Liberal Democracy, and Viktor Orbán

2026-10-20T11:53:38.316-04:00

Patrick Deneen, Liberal Democracy, and Viktor Orbán

Patrick Deneen's critique of liberalism extends considerably beyond the concerns about loneliness he expressed at the Hannah Arendt Forum.

In his influential 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed, Deneen argued that liberalism has failed not because it betrayed its founding principles, but because it fulfilled them. By emphasizing individual autonomy, personal choice, and liberation from inherited obligations, liberalism has, in his account, weakened families, religious communities, traditions, and the institutions necessary for human flourishing.

Deneen has increasingly associated himself with post-liberal political movements, including those inspired by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

In July and August 2025, Deneen participated in discussions at MCC Feszt in Esztergom, Hungary, including a panel on post-liberalism with Chad Pecknold, Gladden Pappin, and István Kiss.

The participants challenged the liberal political order and discussed Hungary's emphasis on national sovereignty, traditional families, religion, and border protection as an alternative. Deneen has previously described Hungary's government as an example for American conservatives.

Orbán explicitly embraces the description "illiberal democracy," arguing that democratic government need not rest upon liberal individualism. His critics, however, contend that his government has weakened judicial independence, media pluralism, and institutional checks on executive power.

Orban was resoundingly defeated earlier this year, but despite Orbán’s political setback, Deneen has not publicly renounced his support for Orbán’s model. In interviews and writings, he continues to frame liberalism as having “failed” in undermining social cohesion and national belonging, and he envisions a “post liberal future” rooted in traditional, communitarian, and conservative principles.

This background creates an important tension with Deneen's Forum address. Arendt warned that loneliness and mass society could prepare the ground for totalitarian domination. Deneen draws upon that warning to criticize liberal individualism, while expressing sympathy for a political alternative whose concentration of power raises its own questions about freedom and pluralism.

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Friendship in Politics on Display

Roger Berkowitz opened the Forum by arguing that political friendship means sharing a world with people whose convictions differ profoundly from our own. He invited Patrick Deneen, whose political philosophy challenges some of the liberal commitments that Arendt's defenders hold dear.

The invitation itself becomes an example of the solidarity that is the theme of this year's Forum. Deneen's talk was an interesting take on the theme of Solidarity.

Patrick Deneen on Loneliness, Liberalism, and the Threat of Totalitarianism

2026-10-20T10:57:20.559-04:00

Patrick Deneen on Loneliness, Liberalism, and the Threat of Totalitarianism

The 20th Hannah Arendt Forum, Bard College — Thursday, October 15, 2026

Patrick Deneen, political philosopher at the University of Notre Dame and prominent critic of modern liberalism, addressed the Hannah Arendt Forum on Thursday with a warning about the growing loneliness and social isolation of modern society. Drawing on the writings of Kurt Vonnegut and Hannah Arendt, Deneen argued that the erosion of human relationships threatens not only individual happiness but also the survival of political freedom.

Deneen began by acknowledging Arendt's influence on his intellectual development. Since graduate school, he explained, her writings have served as a North Star in his thinking about politics and its contemporary crises.

He then turned to a fellow Indiana resident, Kurt Vonnegut. Deneen, originally from Connecticut, has lived in Indiana for fifteen years. Vonnegut, born in Indianapolis, repeatedly explored the costs of modern civilization, particularly the loneliness produced by the dissolution of traditional communities.

Vonnegut was immersed in the horror of war. Captured by the Germans during World War II in the freezing Hell of the Battle of the Bulge, he was taken to Dresden the day before the firebombing of that city. He survived the inferno in a meat processing plant, slaughterhouse five, under the city. More than 25,000 Germans died in the attack. The firestorm and its aftermath profoundly shaped his writing. Vonnegut's most famous book is Slaughterhouse Five about the Dresden bombing. Yet Deneen argued that Vonnegut ultimately identified loneliness as one of humanity's greatest modern afflictions.

In a commencement address at Smith College, Vonnegut provocatively described loneliness rather than cardiovascular disease as America's leading killer.

His 1976 novel Slapstick, or Lonesome No More! explored the same concern. Vonnegut drew inspiration from anthropologist Robert Redfield's concept of the "folk society," a relatively small, stable community held together by kinship, shared history, inherited traditions, and relationships extending across generations.

Vonnegut believed human beings naturally longed for such communities. Their disappearance left people increasingly isolated despite the apparent freedoms and material benefits of modern life.

Deneen argued that contemporary social science has repeatedly confirmed this deterioration of human connections. Americans are less likely than previous generations to marry, have children, participate in religious communities, join civic associations, or maintain extensive personal relationships.

Trust has declined, while social media has expanded contact without necessarily providing meaningful human connection.

He cited the U.S. Surgeon General's report on loneliness and isolation, which associated loneliness with a 26 percent increased risk of premature death and social isolation with a 29 percent increase. The report compared the mortality risks associated with insufficient social connection to those of smoking fifteen cigarettes daily.

Deneen jokingly suggested that perhaps people should smoke cigarettes with their friends.

But the consequences of loneliness extend beyond physical and psychological health. Here Deneen turned to Hannah Arendt and The Origins of Totalitarianism.

He urged his audience to read the final pages of Arendt's monumental work, where she examined the conditions that make totalitarian domination possible.

Arendt recognized that totalitarian movements do not simply impose themselves upon healthy societies. They emerge within societies whose traditional relationships and institutions have already deteriorated.

Individuals who once belonged to families, associations, religious communities, and political organizations become members of an anonymous mass society. Their isolation makes them vulnerable to movements promising belonging, meaning, and collective identity.

Deneen quoted Arendt's warning that loneliness, once largely confined to marginal circumstances such as old age, had become an everyday experience for enormous numbers of people.

For Arendt, this transformation was politically dangerous. The isolated individual, deprived of meaningful relationships and a place in the common world, becomes susceptible to totalitarian domination.

Deneen suggested that modern liberal societies should take this warning seriously rather than congratulate themselves on having escaped the authoritarian catastrophes of the twentieth century.

The very freedoms that liberal societies celebrate may coexist with forms of social disintegration that undermine the foundations of political liberty.

He then considered Arendt's admiration for the ancient Greek polis, the political community in which citizens appeared before one another, spoke, acted, and created a shared public world.

The polis was not simply an administrative arrangement. It was a place where human actions acquired meaning through their recognition and remembrance by others.

Deneen compared Arendt's polis with Vonnegut's folk society. Both represented forms of human association that gave individuals a place within a larger community and connected their lives to a shared history.

Yet Deneen emphasized that neither thinker was simply nostalgic for an imagined golden age. Vonnegut did not propose recreating traditional village life, nor did Arendt advocate restoring ancient Athens.

Both recognized the achievements of modern freedom while questioning whether liberal societies had adequately preserved the relationships that make freedom meaningful.

Their challenge was to recover forms of association capable of counteracting modern loneliness without abandoning the genuine accomplishments of liberal civilization.

Deneen's argument is a provocative contribution to the Forum's theme of solidarity. Solidarity cannot exist among people who have lost the habits, institutions, and relationships that allow them to recognize one another as members of a common world.

His warning was that loneliness is not merely an unfortunate personal condition. It is a political danger.

A society of increasingly isolated individuals may possess extraordinary material wealth, personal liberty, and technological sophistication while losing the human connections necessary to sustain democratic life.

For Deneen, Vonnegut and Arendt present an unsettling possibility: the greatest threat to a free society did not arise from its enemies, but from the unintended consequences of its own successes.

Solidarity: Roger Berkowitz Opens the 20th Hannah Arendt Forum

2026-10-15T21:41:34.042-04:00

Roger Berkowitz opened the 20th annual Hannah Arendt Forum at Bard College with a deceptively simple question: “What are we fighting for?” The theme of this year's gathering, Solidarity, grew directly from last year's exploration of joy. Berkowitz argued that joy cannot remain a private experience. Loving the world means accepting responsibility for the people with whom we share it.

We live in an age when solidarity is proclaimed everywhere—with Ukraine, Gaza, Israel, immigrants, workers, and victims of injustice. Yet our common world seems increasingly fractured. Berkowitz asked whether our declarations of solidarity actually bring people together or simply reinforce the divisions between them.

His answer, drawn from Hannah Arendt, was that genuine political solidarity requires friendship. Not friendship understood as intimacy or agreement, but the willingness to share a world with people who think differently, challenge us, and sometimes disappoint us.

Berkowitz distinguished three responses to human suffering: pity, compassion, and friendship.

Pity, he argued, looks down upon suffering from above. Drawing on Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, he described the Grand Inquisitor, who claims to love humanity while denying people their freedom. The Inquisitor offers bread and security in exchange for obedience. His pity becomes an instrument of domination.

Compassion is different. Dostoevsky's Jesus stands silently before the Inquisitor, offering unconditional love rather than judgment or coercion. Berkowitz quoted Augustine: Volo ut sis—“I want you to be.” Compassion recognizes another person's humanity without demanding that the person change.

But compassion alone cannot create political solidarity. It remains personal and largely silent. Politics requires speech, action, and participation in a common world.

Berkowitz turned to Arendt's experiences helping Jewish refugees in Paris during the 1930s. She discovered that refugees needed more than charitable assistance. They needed work, education, games, singing, reading, and discussion—activities through which people could recover their dignity, freedom, and joy.

He also drew on Arendt's On Revolution, contrasting the French Revolution's emphasis on relieving suffering with the American founders' effort to establish institutions of political freedom. Pity for the poor could justify coercion, while republican institutions offered citizens opportunities to speak and act together.

Friendship provides another possibility. Arendt believed that genuine political friendship emerges through conversation, particularly between people who disagree. Friends do not necessarily share opinions. They share a world and try to understand how that world appears to one another.

This does not mean overlooking evil. Berkowitz emphasized Arendt's insistence upon judgment rather than automatic forgiveness or moral condemnation. Some actions make reconciliation impossible. But judgment considers individuals and circumstances rather than dividing humanity into permanent categories of good and evil.

The forum's program of discussion, music, dancing, and shared experiences was intended to demonstrate this understanding of solidarity.

Berkowitz concluded by returning to Augustine, extending “I want you to be” into a political affirmation: “I want us to share a world.”

Solidarity, he argued, is not simply standing against injustice. It is the patient, difficult, and sometimes joyful work of building a common world with people who are different from ourselves.

Last week Berkowitz published A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World, a fascinating exploration of Arendt's view of friendship and a life devoted to friendship and her friends. I reviewed the book here.

A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World by Roger Berkowitz--A Review

2026-10-11T21:41:19.603-04:00

For several months I have anticipated the new book A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World by Roger Berkowitz. I was not disappointed. The book opens with a sad and dramatic episode showing the fragility of friendship. Berkowitz invited a speaker to a conference who, by the time of the conference, had been elected to the German Parliament as a member of Alternativ fur Deutschland (AfD). The conference went well with students engaging with the controversial speaker. But after the conference, a colleague who Berkowitz considered a friend signed an open letter in The Chronicle of Higher Education condemning him—without calling or in any way getting in touch.

Tensions between friends are precisely a theme of the book. Hannah Arendt lost long-time close friends after publishing an article questioning Zionism after World War II and more so after Ardent published Eichmann in Jerusalem the most condemned and misunderstood of her many books and articles. Berkowitz knits together the various threads of this sad tale in Chapter 6, echoing his own hurtful experience of a friend who denounced him publicly without any prior private exchange. At the same time, Arendt’s “Genius for friendship” is also woven through the entire text, maintaining friendship through and beyond negative experiences. Arendt saw friendship not as romantic love, which fuses two people into one, but as a relationship that preserves each person’s independence based on trust and respect. Friendship allows individuals to “appear before one another as free and distinct beings,” creating the conditions for dialogue, mutual understanding, and the “unity of a plurality” in political community. Which makes friendship a political virtue, modeling the trust and openness necessary for a shared world.

Although I have read all of Arendt’s books and collected essays, I have not read many of her letters. After reading this book, I moved Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy 1949-1975 to my “To Be Read” shelf. Berkowitz devotes Chapter 5 of A World We Share to Arendt’s women friends. In my mind, Arendt seemed very much like Marie Curie in holding a respected place among groups of accomplished men in the gender-segregated world of knowledge. So, to read about Arendt sharing her complicated life with women navigating the patriarchal world of the mid-century was fascinating.

For me, the center of the book, the part I most looked forward to reading, is Chapter 7 titled “From Love to Respect”. Why a chapter on Love? For centuries, Love and Friendship have been systematically contrasted (or defined by contrast?) by philosophers. As opposed to love (eros) which means being attracted to the essence of the beloved, the inner self, “…what we respect in a friend is not their inner self but their persona, says Hannah Arendt, the Roman term for the public face through which one’s dignity resounds.” As I read this chapter, I was hearing lines from The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis. In it, he explains the four Greek words for love which we call friendship, eros, family love, and charity. Lewis says the posture of friendship is side by side: two sharing a walk or some activity. They look out into the world and discuss what they see. In Eros, the lovers are face to face: they look at and into each other.

As Berkowitz states at the opening of chapter 7, “Arendt’s writing does not offer a theory of friendship. She did, however, identify three defining characteristics of friendship: sustained conversation, duration, and respect. … As she wrote, friendship ‘is between two: a cutout of the world.’ … in friendship, two people carve out a space in the world—a homeland of conversation and mutual recognition where truth can appear not as doctrine but as something revealed between them. … Unlike love which can erupt suddenly and fade just as quickly, friendship depends on duration. … the intimacy and trust friendship nurtures cannot be rushed; it requires the slow accumulation of shared experiences and tested trust that develops over years, even decades. … Indeed, friendship is often strongest between those who fundamentally disagree.”

Yet despite those contrasting definitions, both Arendt and Lewis envisage the possibility of a confluence between love and friendship. Arendt describes her husband Heinrich Blucher as the love of her life and her friend. Lewis believed friendship could “turn into love” both metaphorically and actually. The friends turn toward each other when they become lovers. It was another delight of reading this book that I could compare two very different authors I admire very much on the same subject.

The final Chapter of the book titled “Common Ground” ties together the limits and value of friendship. Berkowitz presents a story about the NPR reporter Zack Mack and his conspiracy theory believing father and how they came to share what they could of their very different lives through shared interests. The ability to find and share common ground, to forgive, to work together for love of a common world glows at the center of all of Arendt’s works. Through this book I now know that glow is from inside Arendt herself. At the close of the book, I found myself wanting the book to be much longer. Agreeing with C.S. Lewis when he said, “You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.” But I will keep reading Arendt and discussing her works in the Virtual Reading Group, so the discussion, unlike the book, does not end.

The Square and the Tower by Niall Ferguson--A Review

2026-10-08T13:11:30.020-04:00

I am accustomed to thinking of modern life as a world of networks. The internet and social media make networks almost impossible to ignore. But in The Square and the Tower, Niall Ferguson argues that networks are not primarily a modern phenomenon. They have always existed, and understanding them can change the way we understand history.

The title comes from Siena, where the open Piazza del Campo—the square—sits beside the Torre del Mangia—the tower. For Ferguson, they represent two different ways human beings organize themselves: networks and hierarchies. The tower is government, church, army, corporation—the formal structures of authority. The square is the less formal world of friendships, families, intellectual circles, merchants, conspirators, correspondents, revolutionaries, and eventually Facebook.

History, Ferguson asserts, has traditionally been written from the tower. We study kings, presidents, generals, governments, and institutions because hierarchies keep records. Networks are harder to see. Yet again and again, networks have changed the world.

Ferguson ranges enormously widely, from the Renaissance and Reformation through the Enlightenment, revolutionary movements, the Rothschild banking network, imperialism, the world wars, the Cold War, and Silicon Valley. Martin Luther did not simply challenge the Catholic Church; his ideas spread through a network made vastly more powerful by the printing press. Revolutionary movements depended upon networks. Financial power depended upon them. So did scientific and intellectual revolutions.

One of Ferguson's most useful ideas is the importance of the highly connected person—the node through which an extraordinary number of relationships pass. Some people matter historically not simply because of their formal position but because they connect people who otherwise would not be connected.

C.S. Lewis says this brilliantly in his essay "The Inner Ring." He opens the essay with a passage from Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace showing a purple-faced general waiting on a mere captain who was part of an exclusive network.

Power can come from where you stand in a network as much as from where you stand in a hierarchy. That idea immediately made me think of Phillips Payson O'Brien's The Strategists and his portraits of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Churchill, and Franklin Roosevelt.

Seen through Ferguson's lens, their networks provide an interesting measure of their effectiveness. Hitler and Mussolini created powerful and hateful fascist networks that helped carry them to power. But power increasingly isolated them. Hitler ended in his bunker, surrounded by a shrinking circle while the state and military he commanded collapsed around him. Mussolini similarly lost the network that had sustained him and died violently at the hands of his own countrymen.

Stalin is more complicated. He rose through networks as well as the Communist hierarchy, but his paranoia repeatedly destroyed the human connections around him. He managed during the existential crisis of the German invasion to restrain some of that paranoia and listen to capable military commanders. The Soviet Union survived and eventually defeated Nazi Germany. Afterward, Stalin again descended into increasingly poisonous suspicion and isolation.

Churchill and Roosevelt were the opposite. Both were extraordinary networkers. They cultivated politicians, military leaders, journalists, advisers, friends, and correspondents across decades. During the war they became principal nodes in each other's networks. Their correspondence and personal meetings created a relationship that connected two enormous political and military systems. Roosevelt died in 1945, widely beloved, just before victory in Europe. Churchill lived another twenty years and died one of the most revered figures of the century.

Networks certainly do not explain everything about those five men or the outcome of the Second World War. But Ferguson gave me another way of looking at O'Brien's portraits. The ability to create networks may help people acquire power; the ability to maintain them may help determine how effectively they use it.

That is what I liked most about The Square and the Tower. Ferguson did not merely give me another history. He gave me another way of looking at history. And those are the history books I value most.

Rereading Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare

2026-10-01T19:28:24.744-04:00

Earlier this year I reread Julius Caesar, probably for the fourth time in forty years. I first encountered the play as an undergraduate, and I can trace something important in my life back to that reading: it led me to Shakespeare. I read Romeo and Juliet in high school but it did not resonate then. Reading Julius Caesar a decade later after seven years in the Army I was enchanted.

I knew almost nothing about Roman history then compared with what I know now. Today I can see everything Shakespeare changed. He compressed events, moved things around, invented conversations, and gave Mark Antony a funeral oration that Antony never delivered, nor could have. The real Anthony was much less cerebral, much more soldier.

None of that diminishes the play for me.

Antony's speech remains my favorite passage in Shakespeare. I have read it again and again, and I still marvel at what happens to those Roman citizens as Antony speaks. "Brutus is an honourable man" begins almost respectfully and gradually becomes devastating. Antony never tells the crowd what to think. He leads them there. It was probably my first great lesson in the power of rhetoric—and in what a writer can do with words.

And Julius Caesar opened the door.

Over the next forty years I kept walking through it. I read the histories, tragedies, comedies, and sonnets. I found Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear, hardly original choices for favorites, but I don't feel any need to be original about Shakespeare. They are loved because they deserve to be loved.

What has changed is me.

I read Lear differently five years ago than I could have at thirty. An old man raging against the loss of power, the betrayal of children, the deterioration of the body, and finally death meant one thing when I was an undergraduate. It means something else after four more decades of living. The words haven't changed. I have.

That may be one reason Shakespeare has stayed with me. His characters don't become smaller as I grow older. They become larger. Macbeth's ambition, Hamlet's inner conflict, Lear's terrible pride and grief, Brutus's disastrous idealism—I understand more of them because life has given me more with which to understand them.

Next on my list Julius Caesar is Richard III. For all his flaws, he is a soldier.

There are writers I have admired and writers I have loved. Shakespeare is something beyond either category. He has been part of my reading life for more than forty years.

I began with Julius Caesar as an undergraduate.

I'm still reading him.

And I'm still enchanted.

Partly Strong, Partly Broken by Nathaniel Popkin

2026-09-24T19:47:56.735-04:00

Nathaniel Popkin’s Partly Strong, Partly Broken is a novel about a Jewish congregation, but it is really about the much larger question of what it means to belong to a community when almost everyone in that community disagrees about what it means to belong to a community. Especially to a Jewish community.

At the center is a lesbian rabbi trying to hold together a congregation filled with competing convictions, grievances, friendships, histories, and political commitments. She is pulled in multiple directions, particularly because of her determination that Jewish responsibility extends beyond the boundaries of the Jewish community. Around her, Popkin creates a collection of wonderfully imperfect people whose relationships unfold through Torah study, book discussions, friendships, sexual relationships, family tensions, and tragedy.

Running through the novel is Cain’s question after killing Abel: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Popkin never supplies an easy answer. Instead, he keeps asking variations of it. What do Jews owe one another? What do they owe their neighbors? What does a congregation owe the larger community? What does Israel mean to American Jews? And what happens when obligations to one group appear to conflict with obligations to another? I remember the question of Cain coming up in Torah Study in my synagogue. One guy folded his arms across his chest and said, "Who is my neighbor?"

One of the pleasures of the novel is that these questions emerge from recognizable Jewish lives, not abstractions. Popkin can be very funny. Theo and Celia spend years as friends before finally becoming lovers after Theo asserts himself in public. After a lot of sex inside a vacation house Celia brings him to, Theo is not sure he wants a blow job by the pool. Throughout the book, the rabbi frets about her relationship with her lover--a Palestinian Arab woman who lives in Israel. And when the rabbi goes to the beach to have a day alone before the high holy days, she drives her Subaru--of course.

The novel ends just as news of the slaughter on October 7 reaches America. All of the various conflicts remain unresolved as events in Israel threaten to make every existing division within the congregation deeper. Popkin does not resolve anything. We know that these people are going to continue arguing because the questions they are arguing about cannot be settled.

I read Partly Strong, Partly Broken while traveling through Europe just before the Jewish High Holy Days, and it made the book personal. I found myself thinking about what kind of Jew I am, what I mean when I call myself a believer, and how much I actually want to belong to any religious community.

Popkin has written an engaging novel about American Jewish life, but also something larger: a novel about the difficult difference between having an identity and accepting the obligations that come with it.

And like the best Jewish arguments, it ends without ending.

The Strategists: Character, Strategy, and the Fate of the World

2026-09-18T21:12:41.025-04:00

Phillips Payson O’Brien’s The Strategists is ostensibly a study of five wartime leaders—Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Benito Mussolini—but beneath its military history lies a fascinating argument about character. These men possessed enormous power over the greatest war in history, and the ways they exercised that power cannot be separated from the people they had become long before 1939.

One of the book’s vivid patterns is childhood. With the important exception of Roosevelt, O’Brien’s subjects experienced childhoods marked by serious rejection, deprivation, or violence, even by the standards of their era. Churchill suffered emotional rejection and verbal abuse. Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini grew up amid poverty and violence; the latter three were themselves brutal and troublesome young men. O’Brien does not offer childhood trauma as a simple explanation for dictatorship. But these early experiences help illuminate the extraordinary insecurity, vanity, aggression, and need for dominance that later characterized several of these leaders.

Roosevelt stands apart. Born to privilege and raised in a secure environment, he possessed plenty of vanity and self-confidence, but his confidence did not require him to be right about everything. That distinction becomes enormously important. Roosevelt could change his mind, tolerate competing advisers, and adopt new technologies and strategies. His great strategic insight was that the United States should exploit its immense industrial power rather than fight the kind of war its enemies expected.

Churchill, despite a profoundly different personality, shared some of this flexibility. Both men understood that the Second World War would not simply be a larger version of the First. Air and sea power could destroy enemy production, transportation, shipping, and fuel supplies while Allied industry created forces the Axis could never match. Roosevelt especially understood that American factories, aircraft, ships, and logistical networks were themselves weapons of war.

Hitler and Mussolini were far less adaptable. Both remained intellectually trapped in the First World War. Mussolini emerges as particularly inadequate to the responsibilities he had assumed. He wanted greatness without possessing either the military resources or strategic judgment required to achieve it. Worse, he was extraordinarily sensitive to what he imagined to be the will and enthusiasm of the Italian people. Strategy became theater. Decisions that should have depended upon industrial capacity, logistics, geography, and military reality instead depended upon prestige and emotion.

Hitler’s failure was different and ultimately far more destructive. Early victories reinforced his conviction in his own genius. When his decisions succeeded, the successes proved his superiority. When they failed, the failures did not disprove it: generals, allies, weather, inadequate will, or betrayal were responsible. As Germany’s military position deteriorated, Hitler became not more flexible but more certain. Reality increasingly had to conform to Hitler rather than Hitler adapting to reality.

Stalin presents the most complicated case. His prewar brutality and catastrophic purges had badly damaged the Soviet state and military. Yet the existential crisis created by the German invasion forced him to adapt. He learned to rely more heavily on competent commanders and to make decisions based upon military necessity. For a time, survival disciplined Stalin. Once Soviet victory became increasingly certain, however, the old Stalin reemerged. Success reduced the necessity for flexibility.

This is where O’Brien’s portraits acquire implications far beyond biography. The personalities of five individuals helped determine where armies marched, which weapons were built, how economies were organized, and ultimately whether millions of people lived or died. Character became strategy, and strategy became history.

The contrast is especially striking because arrogance was hardly confined to the dictators. Roosevelt and Churchill could be vain, stubborn, and badly wrong. The crucial difference was not that democratic leaders always made better decisions. It was that they remained capable of recognizing new realities and changing course.

That fits the larger argument running through O’Brien’s work. Modern war is not ultimately decided by heroic battlefield gestures alone. It depends upon production, technology, transportation, fuel, shipping, aircraft, and the ability to replace what has been destroyed. Roosevelt and Churchill increasingly grasped this. Hitler and Mussolini never fully did.

Perhaps the most profound lesson of The Strategists is therefore not about World War II at all. Great power magnifies character. An insecure man’s vanity can become a nation’s strategy; an inability to admit error can become an army’s catastrophe. Conversely, curiosity, adaptability, and the willingness to listen can become strategic assets as consequential as battleships and bombers.

O’Brien shows us five enormously powerful men confronting the same global catastrophe. Their circumstances mattered. Their economies mattered. Their armed forces mattered. But so did something much harder to quantify: who they were when the moment came to decide.

Brave New World: The Dystopia We Chose

2026-09-12T12:14:13.809-04:00

In the swirl of dystopian novels, movies and video series that haunt my mind, I had the idea that I had read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. I hadn't read it. The Brave New World is a bright, fun, full of sex, drugs and rock and roll, but at the same time it is a genetically engineered hell where no one is allowed solitude and thinking will eventually get one banished to a remote island.

The utopia Huxley imagines is more comprehensive and creepy than George Orwell's 1984, which imposes its horror on an existing society, much like the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and Mao's China. The Brave New World eliminated birth and parents and family, the state is all. Children are grown from embryos and seeded in five categories: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and Epsilon in descending order of mental capacity.

The population gets daily doses of the drug Soma to keep everyone happy. Sex is entirely recreational with woman wearing contraceptive bandoliers. Entertainment is everywhere. Solitude forbidden. The only books are engineering and operating manuals.

Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 follows Huxley in the sense that entertainment--the screens--are the real center of control. Burning books is almost unnecessary. Most people don't want them. They want interactive video.

The video series Pluribus is a another twist on Huxley. A pandemic makes the whole world "nice" except a dozen people. The question that animates the series: "Do want to live in a world without conflict? What price will we pay?"

All dystopian novels in the past century are inspired to some extent by WE written by Yevgeny Zamyatin.

I am glad I read it, but won't reread it. In one sense Huxley got closer to modern reality than anyone else. But while his predictions are amazing, he is not a great storyteller. I never found myself absorbed into the world of the novel the way I did in reading A Canticle for Liebowitz--the post-nuclear war dystopia by Walter Miller Jr. The irony and artistry of Miller is wonderful.

Chalk Drawings of Every Award at the Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony

2026-09-07T12:03:05.483-04:00

Soil Science Prize — For burying 1,000 identical pairs of underpants in more than 25 countries and digging them up two months later to assess soil health.

One of the many delights of the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony in Zürich was happening just off to the side of the main stage.

From my seat in the balcony, I could see Keira Lee Rice standing stage right beside a large chalkboard. Each time a new Ig Nobel Prize was announced, Rice began to draw. She had only a few minutes. While the winners were being introduced and their wonderfully improbable research explained, lines appeared rapidly across the blackboard. About three minutes later, there it was: a finished drawing that somehow captured the essence—and the humor—of the research we had just heard about.

Rice is particularly well suited to the assignment because she belongs to both worlds represented by the Ig Nobels: science and art. She is a developmental biologist as well as an artist, and her association with the Ig Nobels began in 2024, at the ceremony at MIT, she experimented with live-illustrating each of the ten prize-winning achievements on a blackboard. The idea worked so well that live drawing crossed the Atlantic Ocean this year. Rice also created the evocative logo for the 2026 ceremony, the first held in Europe after 35 years in the United States.

Rice had to identify its central idea, find the joke hidden within it, translate all of that into a visual image, and then execute the drawing while the ceremony continued around her before the awardees left the podium.

Her pictures captured the spirit of the Ig Nobel Prizes themselves: research that first makes you laugh and then makes you think. Rice managed to accomplish much the same thing—with chalk, a blackboard, and about three minutes.

I photographed every one of her finished drawings. Here are the other drawings:

Peace Prize — For documenting that people value friends who behave viciously toward people they dislike.

Olfaction Prize — For collecting evidence that babies smell wonderful to their parents—but teenagers do not.

Technology Prize — For pioneering “necroprinting”: using mosquito proboscises as high-resolution nozzles for 3D printing.

Physics Prize — For theoretical and experimental work aimed at designing a splash-free urinal.

Biology Prize — For repeatedly and gently stepping on venomous snakes, under varying conditions, to determine what does and does not provoke them to bite humans.

Medicine Prize — Awarded posthumously to Tokuji Unno for an aerodynamic study of how to blow the human nose.

Chemistry Prize — For discovering that milk proteins produced by viviparous cockroaches contain about three times as much energy as milk proteins from cows.

Economics Prize — For amassing evidence that upper-class people are more likely to take candy intended for children and engage in other forms of unethical behavior

Biomechanics Prize — For devising a more precise scientific definition of kissing by comparing kissing behavior in ants, birds, polar bears, and humans.

Buried underpants and a new definition of kissing win 2026 Ig Nobel prizes--Nature Magazine report 2026 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony

2026-09-05T04:04:01.931-04:00

NEWS
04 September 2026

Buried underpants and a new definition of kissing win 2026 Ig Nobel prizes

The awards highlight weird, funny and improbable research that also makes you think.

Chris Simms

Researchers found that land use is a key factor in the decomposition of underwear, more so than other soil characteristics.Credit: Gabriela Brändle/Agroscope

The recognition and prestige of a Nobel prize for groundbreaking work comes with a gold medal and the equivalent of about US$1 million. The parody version, an Ig Nobel prize, devised to celebrate research that makes people laugh, and then think, might not deliver on the cash front, but it does bring considerable renown.

This year’s Ig Nobel prizes were awarded on 3 September at a ceremony in Zurich, Switzerland. They include a biomechanics prize for creating a precise definition of kissing, which works across species and excludes the transfer of food during the act1, a physics award that aims to please with experiments to design a splash-free urinal2 and a soil-science award for investigating what happens if you bury and then dig up 1,000 pairs of underwear3 (see ‘The 2026 Ig Nobel prizewinners in full’).

“I hope that, as well as finding the research amusing, people will come away thinking a little differently about our place in the animal kingdom,” says Matilda Brindle, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford, UK, who was a co-author of the kissing study. “My jaw hit the floor when I got the phone call. It’s certainly one of my proudest life achievements.”

Smooching with Neanderthals

Brindle’s team steamily defined kissing as a “non-agonistic interaction involving directed, intraspecific, oral–oral contact with some movement of the lips/mouthparts and no food transfer”. According to this definition, polar bears, some birds and even ants kiss. What’s more, not only do other primates also snog each other, but the behaviour traces back around 21.5 million years to the ancestor of all the large apes, found the team. This means that ancient Homo sapiens would probably have been smooching Neanderthals.

“We’ve shown that animals kiss and when it could have evolved in the primates; the obvious next step is understanding why. If this award helps spark more curiosity about this sort of question, then that’s a pretty wonderful outcome,” says Brindle.

Levitating frogs

Previous winners of Ig Nobel prizes have included researchers who studied the preferred pizza toppings of rainbow lizards (Agama agama) in Togo4, the levitation of live frogs using magnets5 and research showing that London taxi drivers have particularly large hippocampi in their brains6.

In the prize’s early days — it was launched in 1991 by Marc Abrahams, editor of the satirical magazine Annals of Improbable Research — receiving an Ig Nobel prize was deemed insulting by some, but now many researchers see the awards as a great career boost.

How a silly science prize changed my career

“The visibility they bring is enormous. It exposes research to audiences that would never otherwise encounter it,” says Changhong Cao, a mechanical engineer at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, who is part of the team that won this year’s technology prize for showing that a mosquito’s mouthparts can be repurposed as a nozzle for high-resolution, low-cost 3D printing7.

Cao says that the work shows that even things that people find unpleasant can turn out to be useful — sometimes in the most unexpected way.

Another example of unpalatable items coming in handy is the work of Franz Bender and Marcel van der Heijden at the University of Zurich, who were the researchers responsible for the underwear-burial study. They enlisted community scientists from more than 25 nations to bury the garments and dig them up two months later, which provided insight into how biologically active the soil was.

The 2026 Ig Nobel prizewinners in full

BIOMECHANICS

Matilda Brindle, Catherine Talbot and Stuart West, for devising a precise definition of kissing1.

ECONOMICS

Paul Piff, Daniel Stancato, Stéphane Côté, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton and Dacher Keltner, for amassing evidence that wealthy people are more likely to engage in unethical behavior than are people with lower incomes8.

CHEMISTRY

Sanchari Banerjee, Nathan Coussens, François-Xavier Gallat, Nitish Sathyanarayanan, Jandhyam Srikanth, Koichiro Yagi, James Gray, Stephen Tobe, Barbara Stay, Leonard Chavas and Subramanian Ramaswamy, for discovering that milk proteins from cockroaches that give birth to live young contain three times as much energy as milk proteins from cows9.

MEDICINE

The late Tokuji Unno, for the 1977 study called ‘How to Blow the Nose — An Aerodynamic Study of the Nose Blowing’10.

BIOLOGY

João Miguel Alves-Nunes, Adriano Fellone, Selma Maria Almeida-Santos, Carlos Roberto de Medeiros, Ivan Sazima and Otavio Augusto Vuolo Marques, for gently stepping on various parts of snakes to try to learn what induces a venomous snake to bite a human11.

PHYSICS

Randy Hurd, Zhao Pan, Tadd Truscott and Kaveeshan Thurairajah, for theoretical and experimental attempts to design a splash-free urinal2.

TECHNOLOGY

Justin Puma, Zhen Yang, Evan Johnston, Zixin Zhang, Xiaoyi Lan, Lingzhi Zhang, Hongyu Hou, Zixin He, Ali Afify, Megan Creighton, Jianyu Li and Changhong Cao, for pioneering the use of mosquito proboscises as high-resolution 3D printing nozzles, a process called necroprinting7.

OLFACTION

Ilona Croy, Tomasz Frackowiak, Thomas Hummel and Agnieszka Sorokowska, for collecting evidence that babies smell great to their parents, but teenagers do not12.

PEACE

Jaimie Arona Krems, Rebecka Hahnel-Peeters, Laureon Merrie, Keelah Williams and Daniel Sznycer, for documenting that people value friends who are mean to those that they dislike13.

SOIL SCIENCE

Franz Bender, Marcel van der Heijden, Atlant Bieri and Pia Viviani, for burying 1,000 pairs of underwear in more than 25 nations and digging them up two months later3.

Like candy from a baby

Other awards this year include the physics prize for a team that experimentally validated what makes fluid splash back from urinals and suggested redesigns that could cut the spray to just 1.4% of what is commonly experienced.

The work was inspired by observations after using urinals while wearing sandals and khaki pants, says study co-author Zhao Pan, a fluids physicist at the University of Waterloo in Canada, who suggests names for the new designs that include ‘Nauti-Loo’, ‘Cornucopeea’ and ‘Urine-no’.

Meanwhile, the economics prize went to experimental work by Paul Piff, a social psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, and his colleagues, who showed that wealthy people are more likely to engage in unethical behaviour than are people on lower incomes8.

“We found that wealthier participants were more likely to cut off pedestrians, lie at work and cheat in games to win small sums of money,” says Piff. “In one study, we set out a bowl of candy that was explicitly identified as being reserved for kids. Lo and behold, wealthier individuals took significantly more candy from children.”

Crossing the Atlantic

For the first time in the 36-year history of the Ig Nobel awards, the ceremony was held outside the United States because of the nation’s crackdown on visas and immigration. “We cannot in good conscience ask the new winners, or the international journalists who cover the event, to travel to the USA,” Abrahams explained on the website for the competition earlier this year. “It has become unsafe for our guests to visit the country.”

The change didn’t dampen the spirits of the attendees. Amid the traditional shower of paper planes, prizes in the shape of a giant mushroom were handed to winners by Nobel laureates, including economists Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee.

“I love the Ig Nobel Prizes,” says Pan. “Many Ig-Nobel-winning projects grow out of a good question and genuinely out-of-the-box thinking, not expensive equipment, massive resources or complicated methods. They’re fun, and more importantly, they make people think and learn.”

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-02650-x

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Cheap Train to NYC vs Fast Train--Amtrak Prices Jump--Both Up and Down

2026-09-03T05:22:00.000-04:00

The trip from Lancaster PA a trip to NYC is easiest taking one Amtrak train. That train arrives in about three hours.

A much cheaper alternative involves taking Amtrak, SEPTA and NJ Transit with a total trip time close to five hours.

The difference, of course, is price. But my most recent trip to NYC showed me the difference can change by more than $150 in minutes.

The Amtrak train from Lancaster to NYC averages around $60 but on weekends and peak periods it can approach $200 one way. Seniors get a 10% discount.

The slower trip costs $45 dollars for an adult. Seniors over 65 who have a SEPTA senior card can make the whole trip for $20. $10 for Amtrak, $10 for NJT, free on SEPTA.

While the price is fixed on the slow trains, Amtrak has a variable pricing policy. If you can plan ahead, tickets are often cheaper two weeks or more in advance, $30 to $50.

But the best discounts are right up to the time of boarding. On a recent trip I bought a ticket from Lancaster to Philadelphia for $11 and planned to take SEPTA and NJT to NYC. The trip would have been almost five hours and cost $20.

As the first train approached Philadelphia, I opened the Amtrak app and searched for trains to Trenton. The day before all trains for that 30-mile trip were between $100 and $120. The Amtrak ticket for the next train suddenly dropped to $13. I bought the ticket. I checked for Trenton to NYC, those tickets were close to $150.

Then five minutes after we left Philadelphia station I searched again. Still expensive. Then as we approached Trenton I searched once more: $18 to NYC for the next train. I bought that ticket.

Instead of $20 for the trip I paid $42 but arrived almost two hours sooner. Amtrak trains are more comfortable.

If you have the time, take the slow train. But check along the way. Maybe Amtrak will cut the price by 80% or more just before the next train leaves.

Happy travels!

A Tour of the Academie des Sciences from a Member of the Academy

2026-09-02T14:23:38.616-04:00

Christian Amatore in the Bibliothèque Mazarine in the uniform of members of the Academie des sciences. He is an electrochemist of global reputation with more than 600 publications.

I had the opportunity to tour the French Academy of Sciences with Christian Amatore, who is himself a member of the Academy, and his wife Marie-France.

Le Grande Salle des Seances

Institut de Franc

Christian took me through several of its meeting rooms, the library, and most impressively the great meeting space beneath the oval interior dome. Surroundings appropriate for an institution whose history reaches back to Louis XIV.

The oval dome appears round outside.

The Académie des sciences was founded in 1666 through the efforts of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s powerful minister. Colbert gathered mathematicians, astronomers, physicists, anatomists, botanists, zoologists and chemists to promote scientific investigation and advise the government. The first meeting took place on December 22, 1666, in the king’s library. In 1699 Louis XIV formally reorganized it as the Académie royale des sciences and gave it quarters in the Louvre.

The Academy soon became one of Europe’s great centers of science. Its members investigated everything from astronomy and mathematics to chemistry and natural history. Its scientists participated in famous expeditions to measure the shape of the Earth, and in 1790 the National Assembly entrusted the Academy with helping establish a unified system of weights and measures—work that contributed to the metric system.

The French Revolution interrupted this history. In 1793 the revolutionary Convention abolished all the academies. Two years later the Institut de France was created, and the scientific academy eventually emerged within the new institutional structure.

The magnificent building the Academy occupies today has a separate history. Cardinal Mazarin provided in his will for the creation of the Collège des Quatre-Nations, intended to educate young men from four territories recently incorporated into France. Construction began in the 1660s under Louis Le Vau, one of the great architects of seventeenth-century France, who also worked on the Louvre and Versailles. The college opened in 1688.

Its most recognizable feature is the dome facing the Seine and the Louvre. What appears from outside to be a circular dome is oval inside—a remarkable architectural effect. The room beneath it was originally the college chapel and was intended to contain Mazarin’s tomb. After Napoleon moved the Institut de France into the former college in 1805, architect Antoine Vaudoyer transformed the chapel into the great assembly hall beneath the cupola.

Bibliothèque Mazarine

The library is another link to Mazarin. His great collection was transferred to the Collège des Quatre-Nations in the seventeenth century and survives as the Bibliothèque Mazarine, today containing some 600,000 documents, including thousands of manuscripts and incunabula.

Today the Palais de l’Institut houses France’s five academies. Beneath the dome, academicians continue a tradition extending across revolutions, empires, republics and more than three and a half centuries.

Marie-France and Christian in the meeting hall under the dome

Walking through those rooms with Christian Amatore made that history unusually tangible. The Academy is not simply a monument to France’s scientific past. Nearly 360 years after Colbert assembled that first group of scientists, it remains a place where scientists meet, argue, exchange ideas and try to understand the world.

The official histories are available from the Académie des sciences and the Institut de France's history of the Palais.

The WEIRDest People in the World by Joseph Henrich

2026-08-30T23:02:04.525-04:00

Joseph Henrich’s The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous is an enormous, ambitious attempt to explain something that social scientists have often taken for granted: people in modern Western societies are psychologically unusual.

WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic. Henrich, an anthropologist and evolutionary biologist, argues that WEIRD people differ measurably from much of humanity in the ways they think, reason, cooperate, marry, trust strangers and understand themselves. We tend to be more individualistic, analytical and impersonal. We are unusually willing to cooperate with strangers and join organizations composed of people to whom we are not related. We put considerable faith in abstract principles, rules and institutions.

Henrich argues that these differences are not merely superficial cultural habits. Culture changes people. Literacy, education, occupations and social organization can alter cognition and even aspects of brain development and physiology. Human beings are products of biological evolution, but we are also products of cultural evolution, and the two processes interact.

The book immediately reminded me of Ian Morris’s Why the West Rules—For Now and Niall Ferguson’s Civilization. Both attempt to explain the extraordinary rise of Western societies. Jared Diamond and Yuval Noah Harari have approached related questions on an even larger historical scale. Henrich’s answer, however, surprised me because the institution at the center of his explanation is one that I had never encountered in those other accounts: the medieval Catholic Church.

More precisely, Henrich emphasizes what he calls the Church’s Marriage and Family Program.

Beginning in late antiquity and accelerating through the Middle Ages, the Western Church progressively prohibited practices that had bound people into large kinship networks. Most important was its increasingly aggressive prohibition of marriage between relatives, including cousins and eventually even surprisingly distant relatives. The Church also discouraged polygyny, arranged marriages, adoption and other practices that strengthened clans and extended families.

None of this was intended to create modern Western civilization.

Yet Henrich argues that the unintended consequences were revolutionary.

For most of human history, kinship was among the most important organizing principles of society. People depended upon extended families and clans for protection, marriage, economic opportunity and social identity. Trust was concentrated among relatives. Property and inheritance reinforced family networks. Marriage created alliances between kin groups.

The Church gradually weakened that system in Western Europe.

As cousin marriage declined, extended kin networks fragmented. Households became smaller and increasingly centered on the nuclear family. People became more geographically and socially mobile. A person could no longer depend exclusively upon cousins, uncles, brothers and clan members. Increasingly, individuals had to form relationships with unrelated people.

Out of that transformation came one of Henrich’s most important insights: when kinship weakened, voluntary associations grew.

Guilds, monasteries, universities, religious orders, chartered towns, professional organizations and eventually commercial corporations brought unrelated people together around shared purposes. Cooperation increasingly depended not upon blood but upon rules, contracts, reputation and trust.

This is where Henrich’s psychological argument becomes particularly powerful. Institutions did not simply change because Western people thought differently. Western people came to think differently because they spent generations living within different institutions.

The causal arrow runs both ways.

People accustomed to dealing with strangers become more comfortable trusting strangers. People living under impersonal rules become more inclined to apply universal standards. People freed from dense kinship obligations become more individualistic. They increasingly understand themselves through personal characteristics, occupations, beliefs and accomplishments rather than primarily through family relationships.

Over centuries, Henrich argues, these changes helped produce the extraordinarily peculiar psychology we now call WEIRD.

The consequences multiplied.

Greater individualism encouraged geographic mobility. Impersonal trust facilitated commerce. Voluntary organizations allowed people to cooperate on increasingly large scales. Universities brought scholars together outside kinship structures. Guilds organized craftsmen. Trading companies joined investors who might not even know one another personally.

Eventually the same psychological tendencies contributed to political and intellectual transformations.

The Reformation intensified individual engagement with scripture and literacy. Protestantism encouraged reading, schooling and personal religious responsibility. The Enlightenment pushed universal principles and individual reason still further. Modern science, representative government and market economies flourished within societies increasingly organized around individuals and impersonal institutions rather than clans.

Henrich is careful not to claim that the Catholic Church planned any of this. That is precisely what makes his argument so fascinating.

The Church did not prohibit cousin marriage in order to create capitalism, universities, liberal democracy or the scientific revolution. Medieval bishops were not designing the Enlightenment. Cultural evolution produces enormous unintended consequences. A set of religious rules concerning marriage and family gradually changed social organization; social organization changed psychology; psychological changes encouraged new institutions; and those institutions further changed the people living within them.

It is an extraordinary feedback loop.

Henrich also undermines a mistake that Western researchers have repeatedly made. Psychology has often studied American and European university students and then treated the resulting conclusions as statements about universal human nature. But if Henrich is correct, these research subjects belong to one of the most psychologically unusual populations on Earth. What psychologists thought was simply “human” behavior was sometimes WEIRD behavior.

That alone makes this an important book.

But reading The WEIRDest People in the World also made me think repeatedly about the fragility of the institutions Henrich describes.

One of the great achievements of WEIRD societies has been the development of institutions intended to operate independently of family and clan. Universities, courts, corporations, civil services and democratic governments work best when positions are filled according to competence and rules rather than kinship or personal loyalty. The ideal is imperfectly realized, of course, but the principle itself represents a remarkable historical departure.

That makes the current erosion of institutional norms in the United States particularly disturbing to me. The current President promotes family members, personal loyalists and toadies. Those selected previously for independence or competence have been dismissed. Viewed through Henrich’s argument, it resembles a retreat from one of the distinctive achievements of the long cultural evolution he describes: the replacement of kinship and personal allegiance by impersonal institutions. Henrich talks about the different trajectory and wealth of Northern Italy and Sicily. The former is WEIRD and successful. The later is poor and dominated by gangsters. Trump is dragging the US into mobster government.

History is full of rulers who trusted relatives and loyal dependents precisely because independent institutions threatened their power. Liberal societies attempted something much harder: institutions whose legitimacy did not depend upon personal loyalty to the ruler.

Henrich therefore left me with an unexpected appreciation for how historically unusual—and potentially fragile—our civilization is.

Morris explains much about geography and social development. Ferguson identifies institutions that helped Western civilization achieve extraordinary global power. Diamond emphasizes geography, domesticable plants and animals, disease and technology. Henrich goes somewhere different. He asks what centuries of institutional change actually did to the people themselves.

The West did not simply acquire different technologies and institutions. Over many centuries, Western societies produced people psychologically adapted to a world of strangers, voluntary associations, impersonal rules and individual choice. Those people then created institutions that reinforced those characteristics in succeeding generations.

The process was neither planned nor inevitable.

That may be the most important lesson of The WEIRDest People in the World. What cultural evolution created, cultural evolution can presumably change again.

After finishing this remarkable book, I found myself looking differently at institutions I had previously taken for granted. Universities, professional organizations, independent courts, corporations and representative governments are not simply fixtures of modern life. They are products of an extraordinarily long and improbable historical development.

Henrich has written a book about why Western people became WEIRD.

He also, perhaps unintentionally, reminds us how much work it took to become that way—and how unwise it would be to assume that we must remain so.

How the War Was Won by Phillips Payson O’Brien

2026-08-24T14:52:32.691-04:00

As a former soldier, I am naturally drawn to the great battles of World War II. Stalingrad, El Alamein, Midway and Normandy seem to be the places where the war turned and victory or defeat was determined. In How the War Was Won: Air-Sea Power and Allied Victory in World War II, Phillips Payson O’Brien makes a compelling and thoroughly documented argument that we veterans and history buffs have been looking in the wrong places.

The war was won as much on factory floors, rail networks and shipping lanes in the United States and Britain—and to a lesser extent the Soviet Union—as it was on the great battlefields. Conversely, Germany, Japan and Italy lost the war in smashed factories, broken transportation systems, dwindling fuel supplies and cargo ships sent to the bottom of the sea.

O’Brien does not argue that soldiers or land battles were unimportant. Rather, he challenges the traditional emphasis on armies destroying one another in decisive battles. Modern industrial warfare depended upon an immense flow of aircraft, ships, tanks, trucks, ammunition, fuel and replacement parts. Destroy that flow and eventually even a formidable army becomes incapable of fighting effectively.

This makes some of the war’s most famous battles look different. Stalingrad was a catastrophic German defeat, and El Alamein was an important British victory, but O’Brien demonstrates that the losses of men and equipment in such battles were smaller than their legendary reputations suggest when measured against total wartime production. The decisive struggle was increasingly over whether the Axis powers could manufacture equipment, obtain fuel and transport both to where they were needed.

Aircraft production illustrates the point beautifully. Germany and Japan entered the war with sophisticated aviation industries, yet neither successfully developed and deployed a true strategic heavy-bomber force. Germany struggled with ambitious but unsuccessful designs and eventually abandoned much of the effort. Japan barely pursued the capability.

The Allies made very different choices.

Before the United States even entered the war, it had designed and deployed the B-17 and B-24 heavy bombers and had already begun the enormously expensive development program that produced the B-29. Britain entered the war relying heavily on twin-engined bombers but went on to develop the extraordinarily successful four-engined Avro Lancaster. These were not simply technological achievements. They reflected decisions about what kind of war the Allies intended to fight.

This leads O’Brien directly into one of the most disputed questions of World War II: strategic bombing.

Critics have long argued that the bombing offensive failed to break German morale and that German industrial production continued increasing remarkably late into the war. O’Brien does not deny those facts. Instead, he asks a different question: what would German production have been without the bombing?

His answer is persuasive. Allied air power forced Germany to divert enormous resources into fighters, antiaircraft guns, ammunition and air defense. Bombing devastated oil production, attacked transportation networks and eventually made movement within Germany extraordinarily difficult. Factories were dispersed and production driven underground. The Axis was increasingly forced to spend its shrinking resources defending the industrial system upon which its armies depended.

The same logic applied at sea. Japan possessed an enormous empire rich in raw materials, but those resources were useless unless they could reach Japanese factories. American submarines and aircraft systematically destroyed the merchant fleet carrying oil and other essential materials to the home islands. Japan’s war economy was strangled.

O’Brien’s argument becomes even more convincing when viewed from the opposite direction. The United States possessed not merely enormous industrial capacity but the ability to transport its production across two oceans. American factories produced staggering quantities of aircraft, ships, vehicles and weapons while American and Allied shipping delivered them around the world. Britain contributed a sophisticated industrial and technological base, while the Soviet Union produced immense quantities of land weapons and absorbed terrible human losses fighting Germany in the east.

The result was an imbalance the Axis powers ultimately could not overcome.

What I found most compelling about How the War Was Won is that O’Brien does not merely assert this counterintuitive thesis. He buries the reader in evidence for it. Production figures, aircraft losses, shipping tonnage, fuel supplies and manufacturing priorities accumulate until the traditional picture of World War II begins to change.

That is what an excellent work of history should do.

I would still like to believe that great battles decide wars. Soldiers understandably see history through the ground they fought over and the comrades they lost there. Stalingrad remains Stalingrad, and nothing in O’Brien’s argument diminishes the courage or suffering of the people who fought there.

But courage cannot fuel a tank, replace an aircraft or move an army hundreds of miles.

By the final years of World War II, the Allies could replace almost everything they lost. Germany and Japan increasingly could not. The great battles mattered, but behind those battles stood an industrial war of factories, fuel, transportation and shipping.

O’Brien convinced me that this was where World War II was ultimately won—and lost.

SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard

2026-08-17T08:53:00.000-04:00

I have read a number of histories dealing with different periods of ancient Rome, but Mary Beard’s SPQR accomplishes something difficult: she tells almost a thousand years of Roman history in a single volume without turning the book into either a procession of emperors or a catalog of wars.

Beard begins with Rome’s legendary foundation and carries the story to 212 CE, when the emperor Caracalla extended Roman citizenship to virtually every free inhabitant of the empire. It is an inspired place to stop. Rome had begun as one small community in central Italy and had become an empire stretching across much of the known world. By Caracalla’s time, being “Roman” no longer meant being born in Rome, or even Italy. Citizenship itself had been transformed.

Beard is particularly good at distinguishing between what we know about Rome and what Romans later claimed to know about themselves. Romulus and Remus, the kings of early Rome, the heroic stories of the Republic—all must be examined against archaeology and sources often written centuries after the supposed events. She is willing to say, repeatedly, that we simply do not know. That intellectual honesty makes the parts of Roman history for which we do have strong evidence more convincing.

The familiar characters are here—Cicero, Caesar, Augustus, Nero and the rest—but Beard continually widens the view beyond great men. She is interested in women, slaves, freedmen, provincial inhabitants and ordinary citizens. Rome was simultaneously a society of astonishing political invention and brutal inequality. Liberty and slavery existed beside one another. Republican government produced extraordinary ideas about citizenship while Roman armies conquered and exploited much of the Mediterranean world.

That complexity reminded me of a conversation during my deployment to Iraq. Several soldiers were considering getting SPQR tattoos. The idea was that we Americans were the Roman Empire of the twenty-first century. We did not get very far into the complicated question of whether the United States actually was—or is—an empire. I did point out that tattooing in Roman society was hardly the badge of proud citizenship they imagined. Tattoos and permanent marks were particularly associated with slaves, criminals and other people under institutional control; soldiers were also marked in later periods. Enthusiasm for the SPQR tattoos declined considerably.

The incident seems even more appropriate after reading Beard. One of the strengths of SPQR is her resistance to using Rome as an easy mirror for ourselves. “Rome” was never one thing. Republic became empire. Conquered peoples became citizens. Slaves became freedmen, and their descendants could become thoroughly Roman. Political institutions changed while Romans continued insisting that ancient traditions endured.

Beard ends in 212 precisely because Caracalla’s extension of citizenship represents the culmination of one of Rome’s most extraordinary achievements. An identity that had once belonged to the inhabitants of a small Italian city had expanded until millions of people across Europe, North Africa and the Middle East could call themselves Roman.

SPQR is an excellent history because Beard never allows the grandeur of Rome to obscure its contradictions. Rome could be republican and imperial, civilized and savage, inclusive and brutally hierarchical. Its history resists simple lessons.

Perhaps that is the lesson those of us sitting in Iraq discussing SPQR tattoos were missing. Comparing America with Rome is easy. Understanding what Rome actually was is considerably harder. Mary Beard’s splendid history shows us why.

Seeing the Art and Meeting the Artist at Frieda

2026-08-15T15:33:49.745-04:00

Frieda for Generations is a lovely coffee shop and an intergenerational cultural space centered on conversation and connection in Old City Philadelphia. I have been going there since it opened more than a decade ago. From the beginning they have hosted events and art installations. I stopped at Frieda on my way home from the Brigade 76 reunion in Colorado Springs.

When I entered the high-ceilinged space hanging across the entire back wall and the part of the east wall of the restaurant were 40 wire sculptures. It is the first solo exhibit by New Zealand-born designer and multidimensional artist Michael Rex.

As it happened Michael was having lunch at Frieda with his husband Hodi Poorsoltan and two friends. I took a picture of the exhibit and one of the friends said with a big laugh, "Would you like to meet the artist?" I said I would. And I did.

Michael and Hodi have lived in Philadelphia since 2012 moving from NYC. Michael's website describes the origin of this bright wire sculptures:

Michael’s pieces are created by hand , mostly with 20 gage wire looped in continuous forms. Some are executed in annealed wire and others are in insulated copper to preserve the color of the wire. Michael has also created copper pieces in uninsulated wire that can be hung out of doors and will develop the greenish-blue patina seen on older copper pieces.

The inspiration for Michael’s work is twofold. As a young child he was mesmerized by the mechanics of knitting and recalls many moments looking over the shoulder of his mother and grandmother as they crafted pieces from yarn. The mechanical memory of this was triggered at a 2017 exhibition in Chelsea, when he had the chance to view the work of the late Japanese American artist Ruth Asawa. Interestingly, she attributed her fascination with making wire sculptures to her own childhood experiences of tracing shapes as she worked a plow on her parents’ farm. Michael was inspired to begin experimenting with wire and in three years of intense work has perfected his process.

Michael and I talked about handling wire. I told him I was just returning from and reunion of my tank unit from the 1970s. I told him back then when we set up an outpost or headquarters we often connect the forward troops with wire-connected phones. Wire is more reliable than radio. We had to be careful with stringing wire hundreds of meters to support it and keep it from breaking. Michael's sculptures are hundreds of meters of woven 16- and 20-gauge wire.

For those who want a lunch spot for conversation, Frieda has no internet. It is an excellent place for conversation--possibly about the art on display!

(For those who want to use screens, Frieda has seating outdoors and in the northwest corner of the dining area.)

A Forest of Color will be on display at Frieda until August 30.

50th Anniversary Reunion 1st Battalion 70th Armor

2026-08-12T19:26:03.116-04:00

Fifty years ago Brigade 76, 4th Brigade Mechanized, 4th Infantry Division, flew to West Germany. Four thousand soldiers left Fort Carson, Colorado, to establish an mechanized brigade on the former air base in Wiesbaden, West Germany. Two mechanized infantry battalions (one of the infantry battalions was from Fort Riley, Kansas), an armored battalion, an artillery battalion and a support battalion along with brigade headquarters moved en masse across the ocean.

I was the commander of tank Bravo 13 in 1st Battalion, 70th Armor, the tank battalion. Within 48 hours of arriving, the brigade headed for the East-West border at Fulda. Most of us were in Wiesbaden for two to three years training to fight the war that never happened between NATO and the Soviet Union.

Beginning last Sunday about 20 veterans of 70th Armor returned to Fort Carson for a reunion on the 50th anniversary of our Cold War service.

Sam Rushing, who took the lead in organizing nearly a dozen 70th Armor reunions between 2009 and this year put together an excellent event.

We spent Monday on Fort Carson with:

A Fort Carson Museum tour

Hands-on experience in a Stryker (Armored Fight Vehicle) simulator,

Lunch in a dining facility

Presentations on the Stryker and weapons by a Stryker battalion.

After the day on Fort Carson we had dinner in The Airplane restaurant. It is a 1950s vintage KC-97 refueling plane with booth seating replacing the interior of the airplane. The cockpit and the refueling boom area at the rear of the plane are intact.

On Tuesday we took the cog railway to the top of Pikes Peak.

The final event of was the reunion banquet. The speaker was Lt. Col. Jonathan Patten, commander of the Stryker battalion who hosted us on Fort Carson. Four soldiers from his unit were the honor guard for the event and joined us for dinner.

After the dinner Sam Rushing read a letter from Col. Richard Goldsmith. He commanded 1-70th Armor for two years between 1977 and 1979.

The next morning we left Colorado Springs on planes and in cars to destinations from Seattle, Washington, to Sturgis, South Dakota, to Kansas, Minnesota, Arkansas Pennsylvania and New Hampshire.

My son Nigel and I were delighted with the event as was everyone I spoke to.

Thanks to Sam, Kirk Wood, Bill Betson and the other organizers for a great event.

Responsibility and Judgment by Hannah Arendt

2026-08-11T00:33:14.963-04:00

Hannah Arendt’s Responsibility and Judgment is a posthumous collection of essays, lectures, and addresses assembled around questions that occupied her throughout her life: How do we judge right and wrong? What responsibility does an individual bear for actions committed within a political system? And what happens when the moral standards of an entire society collapse?

These questions inevitably return Arendt to Nazi Germany. In “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,” she rejects the comforting argument that individuals living under dictatorship can surrender responsibility to the system. Hitler did not personally commit every Nazi crime. Thousands of ordinary people made the machinery work. Arendt is particularly interested in those who refused to participate—not necessarily because they possessed a superior moral system, but because they could not live with themselves if they became accomplices. This essay seems disturbingly current. “I was only following orders” is an extreme version of a much more common human temptation: the willingness to surrender personal judgment to a leader, party, institution, or prevailing opinion.

“The Deputy: Guilt by Silence?” was especially striking because Arendt was writing in 1964 about Rolf Hochhuth’s controversial play accusing Pope Pius XII of failing to speak adequately against the Holocaust. When Arendt wrote, much of the evidence remained inaccessible. The Vatican finally opened the archives of Pius XII’s pontificate to researchers in 2020. Subsequent discoveries have made the questions raised by Hochhuth and Arendt even harder to dismiss, revealing how much the Vatican knew about Nazi mass murder while Pius maintained his public caution. The complete historical judgment remains contested, but Arendt’s insistence that silence itself can become a moral act—or failure to act—now seems remarkably prescient. I intend to read The Deputy next.

The longest and most unusual piece in the collection, “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy,” finds Arendt addressing morality more directly than she usually did. She was suspicious of moral rules treated simply as inherited commandments. The experience of Nazi Germany had demonstrated how rapidly supposedly respectable moral standards could be exchanged for monstrous ones. She therefore turns toward Socrates and the relationship we have with ourselves. The essential question becomes not merely what society permits but whether I can continue living with myself after doing something I know to be wrong. Judgment requires thinking, and thinking cannot simply be delegated.

But the essay that affected me most was the last, “Home to Roost: A Bicentennial Address.” Arendt delivered it in Boston in May 1975 as the United States approached its two-hundredth birthday. It became the last work she published during her lifetime. She died that December, at sixty-nine, and therefore never saw the Bicentennial she was contemplating.

There was little triumphalism in her assessment of America at two hundred. The country of 1975 seemed to be coming apart. Saigon had fallen only weeks earlier, completing what Arendt regarded as a humiliating American defeat in Vietnam. Richard Nixon had resigned because of Watergate. Inflation was damaging ordinary life. Cities were deteriorating. Terrorism and political violence seemed increasingly part of the modern world. Most seriously for Arendt, political deception had become institutionalized. The lies surrounding Vietnam and Watergate were not isolated falsehoods but symptoms of a political culture increasingly willing to substitute manufactured images for reality.

Reading “Home to Roost” fifty years later is unsettling because so much sounds familiar. Once again Americans live amid political division, distrust of institutions, inflationary pressures, international disorder, war, terrorism, and an extraordinary capacity for political leaders and their followers to construct competing versions of reality.

Yet history also supplies a caution against despair.

Arendt did not live to see the Bicentennial celebrations of 1976. Nor could she have known that within fifteen years the Berlin Wall would fall, the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe would collapse, and by the end of 1991 the Soviet Union itself would disappear with remarkably little violence compared with what might have accompanied the dissolution of a nuclear superpower. The United States that looked so exhausted and disoriented in 1975 survived its crisis and participated in one of the great peaceful political transformations of modern history.

That does not invalidate Arendt’s warning. It makes it more valuable.

Responsibility and Judgment repeatedly argues against historical inevitability. Political systems do not make our moral decisions for us. Institutions do not relieve individuals of responsibility. A terrible present does not guarantee a terrible future, any more than a prosperous present guarantees continued success. Human beings judge, choose, act, and sometimes refuse to act.

That is why this collection feels so contemporary. Arendt does not give us a moral handbook. She gives us something more demanding: the obligation to think for ourselves and then accept responsibility for what we do.

“Home to Roost” is therefore an appropriate final essay. Arendt spent much of her life examining what happens when people abandon judgment and surrender themselves to systems, ideologies, and convenient lies. In 1975 she turned that same uncompromising gaze upon the country that had given her refuge and citizenship. She found America in serious trouble but did not declare its experiment over.

We know something she could not know.

The Republic survived 1975.

That knowledge should give us hope—but not complacency. Arendt’s entire argument insists upon the difference. Survival is not guaranteed by history. It depends upon people who remain willing to distinguish truth from lies, judge right from wrong, and take personal responsibility when doing so becomes difficult.

A Tale of Two Lovers: A Renaissance Humanist Before He Became Pope

2026-08-05T11:05:01.869-04:00

A Tale of Two Lovers by Aeneas Silvio Piccolomini is an unusual tale both for its content and because the author would later become Pope Pius II. Written in 1444 while Piccolomini was a diplomat and Renaissance humanist, the novella became one of the most popular love stories of the fifteenth century. After his election as pope in 1458, however, he distanced himself from the work.

The story belongs to the long tradition of medieval and Renaissance courtly romance that stretches from Chrétien de Troyes to the literature eventually satirized by Cervantes in Don Quixote. Yet Piccolomini's lovers are more human than the idealized knights and ladies of earlier romances. They are driven not simply by chivalric devotion but by genuine physical desire.

What surprised me most was the novella's frank celebration of physical love. The lovers meet only twice, yet on both occasions they delight in one another passionately and immediately long for another meeting. Piccolomini presents their intimacy not as temptation but as an essential expression of their love. For a work written in the middle of the fifteenth century, the openness with which he portrays mutual physical affection feels remarkably modern. The story is, for much of its length, unabashedly in love with physical love itself.

In the end, however, the novella returns to convention. The lovers cannot escape the moral and social order surrounding them. The heroine dies in despair, while the knight ultimately marries a worthy bride, restoring the expected balance of virtue and duty. The conclusion is obligatory. The author recognized that his celebration of passion required a moral resolution acceptable to his audience.

A Tale of Two Lovers is not a great work of Renaissance literature, but it is a fascinating one. It stands between medieval romance and Renaissance humanism, revealing a writer more interested in the psychology of love than in the conventions of chivalry. Read today, it is made even more intriguing by the knowledge that its worldly, perceptive author would later become the head of the Roman Catholic Church. That remarkable transformation gives the novella an historical irony almost as memorable as the story itself.

Cambridge American Military Cemetery: Remembering the Airmen Who Never Came Home

2026-07-29T22:15:17.444-04:00

Last month I visited the Cambridge American Cemetery in the quiet English village of Coton, just west of Cambridge. Maintained by the American Battle Monuments Commission, the cemetery is the resting place of 3,811 American servicemen and women who died during World War II. The Wall of the Missing bears the names of another 5,127 whose remains were never recovered or identified.

Walking among the rows of white marble crosses and Stars of David, I was struck by how many of those buried there were young airmen. The cemetery lies only a few miles from the airfields that housed the Eighth Air Force, whose heavy bombers flew daily missions over Germany and German-occupied Europe. Although the cemetery includes soldiers, sailors, and a small number of nurses, its character is unmistakably tied to the strategic air campaign.

The Eighth Air Force paid a terrible price for daylight precision bombing. A B-17 or B-24 carried a crew of ten men. On many missions, bombers returned to England riddled with flak and machine-gun fire, their crews nursing dead and wounded comrades. Others never returned at all, disappearing into the North Sea or crashing deep inside enemy territory. Walking through the cemetery, it was impossible not to imagine the stories behind the thousands of identical white markers—pilots, navigators, bombardiers, radio operators, engineers, and gunners who climbed into their aircraft knowing that each mission might be their last.

The cemetery also contains the graves of Medal of Honor recipients and the remains of airmen whose sacrifice helped establish Allied air superiority before the Normandy invasion. Their efforts crippled German aircraft production, transportation networks, oil supplies, and industry, contributing significantly to the eventual defeat of Nazi Germany.

The Cambridge American Cemetery is a place of extraordinary peace. Birds sing, the lawns are immaculate, and the surrounding English countryside seems untouched by war. Yet beneath that tranquility lies the memory of one of history's most costly air campaigns. It is a fitting memorial to the thousands of Americans who crossed an ocean to defend freedom and never made the journey home.

The Battle of Salamis: The Victory That Saved Greece

2026-07-24T08:33:55.526-04:00

Barry Strauss’s The Battle of Salamis is a well-written, readable account of one of the decisive battles of the ancient world. Drawing on Herodotus and other ancient sources while incorporating archaeological evidence and modern scholarship, Strauss reconstructs the naval battle of 480 B.C. with enough detail to make the confused and dangerous fighting vivid.

I was impressed by Strauss’s portrayal of the divisions within the leadership of both sides. We tend to look backward at famous victories and assume that the winning strategy must have been obvious. At Salamis, almost nothing was obvious. The Greek coalition was fragile, its commanders disagreed about where and even whether to fight, and individual city-states had different interests. The enormous Persian force under Xerxes suffered from its own divisions, conflicting advice, and difficulties of command.

At the center of Strauss’s account is Themistocles. Strauss gives him much of the credit for the Greek victory, and persuasively so. Themistocles understood that Athens could not defeat Persia on land and had spent years building the Athenian fleet. At Salamis he recognized that the narrow waters could neutralize the Persians’ numerical advantage. Perhaps most importantly, he possessed the political cunning necessary to hold the divided Greeks together and maneuver both allies and enemies into fighting the battle where he wanted it fought.

The result was a devastating Persian defeat. Salamis did not immediately end the Persian invasion, but it destroyed Xerxes’ hopes of conquering Greece by overwhelming force and helped preserve the independence of Athens and the other resisting Greek states.

Strauss is particularly good at reminding us that history is made amid uncertainty. The participants at Salamis did not know they were fighting one of history’s most consequential battles. They were frightened men making difficult decisions while their leaders argued about what to do next.

The Battle of Salamis succeeds as both military history and narrative history. It explains ships, tactics, geography, politics, and personalities without losing sight of the human drama. Above all, it restores Themistocles to the center of the story: a brilliant, difficult, sometimes manipulative leader whose preparation and judgment helped make an improbable Greek victory possible.

We: The Forgotten Beginning of the Dystopian Novel

2026-07-17T17:56:47.046-04:00

I finally read Yevgeny Zamyatin's We at the urging of a friend, and I am glad I did. As I was reading, I knew I had found the source that of the stream of dystopian novels I have loved. Written in 1920–21 during the earliest years of the emerging Soviet state, the novel was considered too dangerous to publish in Russia. It first appeared in English translation abroad in 1924 and was not officially published in the Soviet Union until 1988, just before the Soviet system itself collapsed. That history alone makes We sadly typical of Soviet repression. It is one of the earliest warnings that a revolution promising perfect equality could end in brutal tyranny.

Reading We today, however, requires adjusting one's expectations. If I had read it before reading George Orwell's 1984, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, or Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, I might have stopped reading. Instead, I often found it strange, dreamlike, and structurally uneven. The plot is weaker than the novels it inspired, and at times the symbolism overwhelms the story. George Orwell reached much the same conclusion in his 1946 review, praising the book's originality while acknowledging that it was not entirely successful as a novel.

Yet dismissing We because of its shortcomings would be a mistake. Its historical importance and flashes of brilliance more than justify reading it.

The novel follows D-503, the chief engineer of the spaceship Integral, who lives in the mathematically ordered One State. Citizens have numbers instead of names. Glass buildings eliminate privacy. Daily life is governed by precise schedules. Individual freedom has been sacrificed for collective happiness. D-503 begins as a loyal servant of the state, convinced that reason has solved every human problem. His orderly existence begins to unravel after he meets the mysterious I-330, whose unpredictability introduces him to imagination, passion, and rebellion.

[Aside on names: In the novel men are consonants, women are vowels. Their apartment number and name are the same. In translation, this caused a small difficulty because the first-person narrator is "I" in English. His lover is also "I" short for I-330 and confusing to an English reader. In Russian the narrator uses Я to refer to himself. His lover is И-330 or И for short. The work of translation is endlessly complex.]

The central conflict is not merely political but philosophical. Can human beings ever be completely happy if they are not free? Can reason eliminate the irrational parts of human nature without destroying humanity itself?

One of the novel's finest moments comes during D-503's conversation with I-330 about revolution. D-503 assumes that history can eventually reach perfection, a final state beyond which no further change is necessary. I-330 calmly dismantles this assumption. Revolution, she argues, is never finished because there can never be a final number. Just as there is no largest number, there can be no final revolution. Every system claiming perfection eventually becomes another system needing to be overthrown. It is a remarkable passage because it transcends its Soviet setting and becomes a meditation on every ideology that promises permanent political perfection.

The dialogue:

D-503: Do you realize what you are suggesting is revolution?

I-330: Of course it's revolution. Why not?

D: Because there can't be a revolution. Our revolution was the last and there can never be another. Everybody knows that.

I: My dear, you're a mathematician: tell me, what is the last number?

D: What do you mean the last number?

I: Well, then, the biggest number?

D: But that's absurd. Numbers are infinite. There can't be a last one.

I: Then why do you talk about the last revolution?

-----------

Reading We, it quickly becomes apparent how deeply it influenced later dystopian fiction. Orwell's debt is unmistakable. The surveillance state, suppression of individuality, manipulation of language, and psychological control all anticipate 1984. Huxley borrowed different elements. The sacrifice of individuality for social stability, the management of desire, and the preference for engineered happiness over freedom all echo through Brave New World.

Margaret Atwood, who wrote the introduction to my edition translated by Bela Shayevich, rightly places We among the foundational works of modern science fiction. Without Zamyatin, it is difficult to imagine the dystopian literature that followed throughout the twentieth century.

Even the newest entries in the genre continue to explore questions Zamyatin first raised. Vince Gilligan's Pluribus imagines a world transformed by an alien phenomenon that leaves almost everyone peaceful, cooperative, and genuinely happy—but at the cost of individual identity and independent will. Unlike Orwell's nightmare of oppression, or Huxley's world of engineered pleasure, Pluribus asks whether humanity might willingly surrender its individuality for universal harmony. The question is strikingly similar to the one at the heart of We: If freedom disappears but conflict, hatred, and war disappear with it, have we created paradise—or simply another prison?

I kept reading not because of the plot itself but the atmosphere of uncertainty. Throughout the novel I remained genuinely unsure who would betray whom. Loyalties constantly shift. D-503 cannot even trust his own thoughts as his awakening consciousness places him increasingly at odds with the One State. That suspense carried me through passages that otherwise felt obscure or overly symbolic.
In the end, We is probably more important than it is enjoyable. Its influence far exceeds its literary polish. Orwell and Huxley would write more disciplined novels with stronger narratives, Atwood would bring dystopian fiction into the modern era through the experiences of women, and Gilligan has carried many of the same philosophical questions into the twenty-first century. Yet all of them owe a debt to Zamyatin's astonishing act of imagination.

For readers who have already experienced 1984, Brave New World, The Handmaid's Tale, and now Pluribus, We is not simply another dystopian novel. It is the spring from which much of modern dystopian fiction flows. Despite its uneven plot and occasional obscurity, it deserves to be read for its originality, its courage, and the remarkable prescience of its warning. Reading it more than a century after it was written, and decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union that once suppressed it, I admire how clearly Zamyatin saw the dangers that lay ahead.

David Hockney at the Serpentine: Peace in a Place Built for War

2026-07-16T09:12:21.313-04:00

On a recent visit to London I discovered that the setting of an exhibition can become part of the experience. That was certainly true of David Hockney's exhibition at the Serpentine North Gallery in Kensington Gardens. Much of the exhibition is devoted to the landscapes Hockney painted during his years in Normandy, images filled with quiet country roads, blossoming trees, changing seasons, and the gentle rhythms of rural life. Yet these peaceful scenes are displayed inside a former World War II ammunition bunker.

The irony is striking. Visitors descend into a structure built to support war and find themselves surrounded by paintings celebrating peace. The contrast is made even richer by Hockney's choice of subject. Normandy is remembered throughout the world for the D-Day landings and the fierce battles that followed in the summer of 1944. Yet Hockney largely ignores that history. His Normandy is a place of orchards, hedgerows, sunlight, and renewal. The same countryside that once echoed with artillery now becomes a celebration of color and life.

Five years ago I visited Hockney's exhibition at the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris, where his landscapes from Normandy also dominated the galleries. Seeing this newer exhibition reminded me how deeply the French countryside has become part of his artistic imagination. Rather than chasing novelty late in life, Hockney has continued to explore familiar landscapes with undiminished curiosity, finding endless variation in changing light, weather, and the cycle of the seasons.

What continues to distinguish Hockney's work is his extraordinary delight in seeing. His paintings are less concerned with photographic realism than with communicating the experience of looking closely. Trees seem almost to pulse with energy, colors become more vivid than nature itself, and ordinary country lanes invite the viewer to slow down and pay attention. His landscapes radiate optimism without becoming sentimental.

The exhibition also demonstrates Hockney's willingness to embrace new technologies while remaining faithful to traditional artistic concerns. Whether working with oil paint, acrylic, or digital media, he is ultimately pursuing the same question: how can an artist represent the experience of seeing the world?

Leaving the gallery, I found myself reflecting once again on the remarkable irony of the exhibition. A wartime bunker had become a sanctuary for paintings celebrating peace, while landscapes forever associated with one of history's greatest battles had become images of serenity and renewal. It was a fitting reminder that places marked by conflict can, with time, become places where beauty once again flourishes.