One Book, Sixty Years of History: Noam Chomsky and Vijay Prashad’s The Withdrawal – Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power

As I read the final pages of Noam Chomsky and Vijay Prashad's powerful new work, The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power, I immediately thought of a 2020 Jacobin article by Daniel Denvir, a great reporter and author (as well as host of a fantastic podcast called The Dig), originally published …

Bridging Eastern and Western Philosophy: Lao Tzu and Wittgenstein

The final line of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." The first line of the Lao Tzu or Tao-Te Ching, is "The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao." The intriguing way these two lines build each other regarding the inexpressible is the basis of …

Go vs Chess, Intuition vs Calculation: Kano Yoshinori’s Graded Go Problems for Beginners

Humanity has always been fascinated by games - it's part of what makes us human. But no two games exert quite the same pull on our collective imaginations as Go and chess (along with all it's variants), both of which are played around the world, pop up in every cultural medium, and seem to be …

The Great Road of China: Will Doig’s High-Speed Empire -Chinese Expansion and the Future of Southeast Asia

When's the last time a government project inspired you with awe? There have been plenty of good and awful things the government has done or tried to do, but what I'm talking about is something more, something stirring and potent. I can't think of any off the top of my head. What does come to …