In the eleventh century, Pope Gregory VII fought local rulers who dominated the church. To counter them, he created Europe’s first modern bureaucracies and changed the organization of power forever.

Soon after my interrogation by Transnistria’s state security, mysterious assailants attacked their headquarters with rocket launchers. The nearby war is drawing in the pro-Russian breakaway state.

Divides in Europe have undermined France’s dream of regional sovereignty. Increasingly, its leaders are looking south toward the Mediterranean region instead.

In 1994 Kazakhstan’s president Nursultan Nazarbayev made a plan to revitalize the Eurasian economic space. Nearly thirty years later, that world struggles to be born.

In this previously unpublished essay, the late historian Carroll Quigley outlines the history of Western epistemology and how George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four shows us its future.

North Korea is regrowing its forests in a program of nationalist ecology. As environmental crises unfold, other countries will come to share its strategy.

Stanford dismantled its famously spontaneous campus life. The cost may be what made it great: cultivating free, independent agency in its students.

In 2009, a disastrous project on Sepulveda Pass revealed the roadblocks that stop the U.S. from being able to build.

From obesity and microbiome decline to autoimmune disorders, the modern industrial diet has become a species-level biosecurity threat.

In 1945, Kishi Nobosuke was a Manchukuo boss charged with war crimes. 12 years later he led postwar Japan, embodying an imperial ideology whose influence long outlasted its empire.

In the 1960s, Buddhism found a new spiritual homeland in California. It was the last step in a transformation that began generations before.

The consequences of fire suppression in California have challenged man’s relationship to the land. But the Golden State’s landscapes have always been intertwined with human vision—not separate from it.

Years of development under President Erdogan are changing the face of Istanbul. Instead of a rejuvenated capital, it has become a microcosm of Turkey’s wider conflicts.

Catalonia’s nationalist politicians made their careers on symbolic separatism. In 2017, a successful referendum for independence called their bluff.

When societies enter periods of chaos, the contingencies of history can change the world. These are the times of heroes.

China’s imperial elites have made a comeback after decades of Maoist persecution. When it comes to elite persistence, are they the exception or the rule?