Pietro Boselli is a model, mechanical engineer, and adventurer. He discusses the value of many sources of experience, trusting your instincts, and death-defying solo trips into the unknown.

Children need purposeful work to develop agency and self-possession. That education is unlikely to happen in school.

Complex systems like air traffic and energy operate on rigorous competency. With the managers of these systems prioritizing goals like diversity, these networks are now eroding.

The core “WEIRD” populations of industrial society are getting consumed by it. They need to biologically assert themselves for technological civilization to survive.

ESG has created a luxury good out of symbolic pro-social investing. In practice, it mainly replicates consensus ideology. Those who want to go beyond it must act directly on the world.

Despite its early industrial dominance, Britain’s elites never managed to adapt to the new landscape of power. After more than a century of structural breakdown, its very future as a unified state is in doubt.

You don’t reshape society by starting a cultural movement. Instead, you need to implement direct action materialism.

Art today often aims to shock rather than inspire. How did that change happen?

Bill Bensley looks back on decades of perfecting his maximalist design philosophy in Asia. He discusses his approach to cultural interpretation, ecological synthesis, and the pursuit of artistic excellence.

Golden ages leave behind the undying fame of their heroes. It is those who engage them as peers that become capable of initiating a new one.

Demographic collapse is now inevitable in most countries. Families that optimize for child-rearing now will build the cultures of the future.

Postwar America’s aerospace industry combined captured German personnel with manufacturing excellence to accomplish the most incredible engineering feats in history. But process knowledge can be easily lost.

Nineteenth-century Americans stunned outsiders with their capacity for self-organizing. By cultivating the virtues of public usefulness, procedural formality, and agentic hierarchy, they created a powerful set of norms for building institutions.

The decline of American community life did not begin with the internet. Over the course of the mid-twentieth century, the country’s urban centers were bulldozed through to make room for freeways.

As Mao Zedong’s wife, Jiang Qing helped lead China’s Cultural Revolution with a Nietzschean philosophy of art. Through revolutionary operas and ballets, she sought a heroic consciousness that could transform society.

Despite modern approaches to archaeology and preservation, as history moves forward we will only lose knowledge of the past.