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If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Niall Ferguson, the celebrated British historian now at Stanford’s Hoover Institution has spouted his own version of that age-old riddle. In Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe , the prolific author sets out to undermine the distinction between natural disasters and

The government and its supporting lackeys would like us to believe they are our knights in shining armor protecting us against the unexpected evils of the world. We supposedly can trust that they’ll show up and keep us safe. If the food we eat doesn’t qualify for the well-intended and carefully balanced (i.e., politically infested and poorly

For understanding our modern monetary troubles, Nik Bhatia’s pamphlet-sized book from last year hits exactly the right intersection between money and banking, between the past and the future. Clocking in at around 150 pages of easy prose, it’s accessible but not dumbed down, revealing but not inaccurate. It has a simple framework that Bhatia

“Buy into a business that’s doing so well an idiot could run it, because sooner or later, one will.” — Warren Buffett The curious thing about democracy is that somehow the worst get on top . Despite all the high-flying words, the mass campaigns, the public debates, the mass pilgrimage to the voting booths, and the many promises about greener,

“Most citizens are not doing us any favor by voting. Asking everyone to vote is like asking everyone to litter.” —Jason Brennan, Against Democracy No, the title is not a typo: I mean the opposite of the quip many people use after elections: “If you don’t vote, you have no right to complain.” The romantic view of democratic government is the idea

For all the great value in Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein’s new book, A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century , we find plenty of enmity toward markets and market forces. The market’s avarice and ravenous desire for growth is bad for the planet, and increasingly bad for us; it distorts incentives in health, in medicine, in education, and

The historian and economist Deirdre McCloskey often laments the power that pessimism and despair seems to have over us. In her review of Thomas Piketty’s doorstop-sized book on capitalism and inequality—oh, in that long-forgotten blissful past when our media and politics were dominated not by viruses and misinformation and the racist-sexist

“We live in a time where few understand how things get made. It is fine to not know where stuff comes from, but it isn’t fine to not know where stuff comes from while dictating to the rest of us how the economy should be run.” — Doomberg Eighty-five percent of human energy usage comes from burning things. Either plants or trees grown in a

Jordan Peterson is a Canadian psychologist, lecturer, and intellectual with a comparative advantage in enraging the left-establishment elites. That’s a valuable trait on its own, but Peterson’s more profound contributions to cultural and intellectual life in the 2010s and 2020s lay in his YouTube lectures, books (primarily 12 Rules for Life and

Natural orders are things that emerge on their own or reflect the true nature of how something is or was meant to be. Two of my favorite books, both of which dramatically changed my outlook on the world, are A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century (by biologists Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein) and Company of Strangers: A Natural History