People love big things. Big cars, big houses, big countries. Something in the human brain still worships scale, as if the mammoth that impressed our ancestors is still walking somewhere behind us. And so, many citizens will proudly point at the map and say: “Look how enormous it is — this is greatness.” They say it with the same confidence with which a smoker says his cough is “just from … Read the rest
Europe is very easy to insult.
From a certain angle, the continent looks like an aging museum with Wi-Fi: polite, overregulated, uncomfortable with power, lost in its own procedures while other players move faster and hit harder. If you lived here in the 1970s and come back now, the contrast feels almost obscene. Where once your memory stored quiet town squares and local accents, now it finds the familiar … Read the rest
When I was a young lad long ago in the bland, faceless, smugly prosperous America of the 1950s, I had an itch to be somewhere else. As I heard the expression put first on the TV series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, I would indulge myself regularly in a game called “Anywhere but Here.” The Germans have a beautiful word for it: Wanderlust.
But … Read the rest
Content 21+ In his article The More, The Merrier, Eric Le Roy offers us a sweeping, grand, and altogether delightful eulogy for human progress. The gist of it, if I may summarize, is this: humanity is a snarling, territorial beast, doomed to repeat its primal mistakes forever—so much so that any attempt at improvement is as futile as trying to teach calculus to a goldfish. Immigration, in particular, is … Read the rest
By Eric Le Roy
Content 21+ Artem’s recent article “Borders, Bogeymen, and Billion Dollar Boosts” deserves a thorough response. I say this because in many areas his reasoning is beyond reproach and his data irrefutable. If I may presume to put a few words into his mouth (for what follows is neither a quote nor a paraphrase), I would say that the thesis of one aspect of his essay … Read the rest
