You are not free merely because you can vote. A frightened majority can surrender rights faster than any dictator needs to seize them. The machinery of democracy can be used to dismantle the very…

The government of Nepal approaches the international trough once more, hands outstretched, demanding compensatory tribute from wealthier nations. The justification hardly matters…

It is always comforting for an establishment to personalize its failures. To reduce a vast, tectonic civilizational tremor to the singular malice of Donald Trump is an irresistible narcotic for those…

And what becomes of the billions incinerated along the way? Who is summoned to answer for the squandered capital, the idle depots, the systemic fraud of the transition? No one.

One can comprehend Javier Milei’s predicament without falling prey to his mythos. Stripped of the performative fury and the ideological theater, his enterprise collides with two immovable realities…

In the opening years of this century, an offhand remark during an idle exchange with an old friend lodged itself permanently in my thoughts. We were speaking of trivialities, the sort of aimless drift...

In 1992, Francis Fukuyama published The End of History and the Last Man. Appearing in the immediate wake of the Soviet collapse, the thesis captured the intoxicated triumphalism of an era.

The surface theater of the Iranian confrontation—the loitering munitions, the charred infrastructure, the temporary scrambling of logistical lanes—is not where the mortal peril resides.

The doctrine of imminent depletion is older than most of those who preach it. For more than half a century, I have watched the horizon of so-called “Peak Oil” recede every time humanity drew near.

Every year, the demographic balance of North America quietly rearranges itself. The migratory instinct manifests in two distinct rhythms: the seasonal drift of the seasonal traveler…

Modern man has finally achieved freedom: someone else cooks his food, stores his files, plans his route, manages his money, recommends his entertainment, and politely reminds him to stand up every…

Ecological catastrophes are rarely natural; they are almost invariably subsidized. Across the 1960s and 1970s, Austrian forestry policy orchestrated a monumental environmental blunder.

Radiation obeys an elementary, unyielding law of geometry: it does not turn corners. Electromagnetic and particulate radiation propagates along an absolute, unbending vector. It cannot negotiate bends...

Mass democracy carries an intrinsic, structural defect within its foundational premise: it distributes decisive political leverage to actors who bear zero personal liability for the outcomes of their…

The pretense of orbital innocence has finally cracked. With Washington acknowledging its weaponized capabilities in space, the predictable theater of diplomatic dismay and manufactured outrage has…

We have lived in the shadow of what is now casually branded “artificial intelligence” for far longer than our short cultural memory cares to admit. Cast your mind back to the twilight of the twentieth...

Totalitarian architectures built upon ideological narratives obey an unforgiving pharmacological law: tolerance inevitably sets in. When a movement’s primary mechanism of social cohesion is moral…

I attended law school decades ago, when the digital world was still tethered to the screech of analog modems. While that nascent connectivity felt transformative at the time…

Norway enjoys a sterling reputation as the enlightened darling of the modern West: egalitarian, environmentally conscious, and governed with an air of unassailable institutional serenity.

Moral grandstanding frequently mistakes abdication for control. When the George W. Bush administration curtailed federal funding for embryonic stem cell and genetic research, the policy was framed as…

Capital does not wander into jurisdictions with fragile environmental safeguards by accident; it is driven there by deliberate economic calculation. In modern resource extraction—most visibly in…

We climb the ladder for money, status and success. But the real reward is identity. What happens when the ladder finally lets go?

He has a point. I am not sure about USD 40 a barrel. But watching what oil has done during what may be the most extraordinary confluence of crises we have seen since the Second World War tells us…

That is bad. Repairing the physical damage will take time, I suppose. Industrial facilities can be rebuilt. Infrastructure can be repaired. Production can eventually be restored. But the bigger damage...

The smaller the business, the better the odds that you are looking at something genuinely entrepreneurial. Large corporations, of course, adore the vocabulary. Their management teams like to imagine…

Japan is a difficult case because its need for gas collides with some remarkably uncompromising geological and geographical realities. Japan does not have the convenient luxury of depleted gas fields…

We have been shrinking in the developed world for decades. This is hardly a new discovery. When I went to school in the 1970s, there was already serious discussion about developed economies losing…

South Africa’s real problem is not its geographic isolation. It is certainly a problem. South Africa sits well outside the main routes along which LNG tankers typically move…

I have often wondered how figures such as Greta Thunberg could ever rise to such extraordinary fame. Yes, she is properly reviled in many quarters now, for a long catalogue of statements…

Oil prices are spiking? Really? I am 57 years old. Just over half a century. Long enough to have watched the Cold War, both Gulf Wars, September 11, financial crises, regional wars and more…

Leadership is overrated. Much of what we see, admire, and call leadership is little more than a Ponzi scheme. One group throws its scruples overboard, climbs aboard a train it knows is unlikely to…

Youth is a time of madness. The world is enormous, everything appears possible, and consequences seem like a problem belonging to some distant future. We want everything. We want it now.

We were promised freedom from hierarchy. Naturally, we responded by building millions of tiny kingdoms, crowning ourselves authorities and constructing elaborate status systems around people we had…