Modernist and pre-modernist unexamined “objectivity” isn’t coming back, but meaning need not be a casualty. Rigorous post-modernism grounds social meaning in the radically interconnected experience of our shared society.
Palladium senior editor Wolf Tivy holds a digital salon with William Eden, Matt Parlmer, and a few select audience guests, to discuss coronavirus, why we took it seriously early on, and what we’re doing for the public good.
Hierarchy is necessary to functional society. But we are haunted by the memory of past injustices, so we’ve clung to unrealistic ideals of equality. It’s time to start rebuilding the positive case for just and useful hierarchies.
Jonah Bennett interviews Mwiya Musokotwane, who is building Nkwashi, a new city in Zambia.
The sexual revolution, individualism, and technology have all been blamed for our social pathologies, especially widespread loneliness. But the underlying problem is an economy which cannot sustain deep social fabric.
Faith in democracy has been shaken by populist upheavals over the last decade. This has opened the door for theorists like Garett Jones to explore how the state could be improved with a little less democracy.
Deep in Siberia, Nikita Zimov is restoring the Pleistocene ecosystem to combat climate change and undo the damage done by ancient over-hunting. Wolf Tivy interviews him to find out how and why.
Henry George foresaw San Francisco’s housing crisis. His solution is still the way forward: a bold developmentalist orientation, starting with a land value tax to incentivize denser building.
Jonah Bennett and Wolf Tivy interview Sean Pawley on his work developing a new bank in East Africa and how Rwanda has developed under a Singapore-style model since 1994.
Since the Cultural Revolution, China has feared and suppressed mass mobilization. The theories of French thinker Gustave Le Bon influence both the party and its critics in their evaluation of the mob.
Wolf Tivy interviews Ben Landau-Taylor and Oberon Dixon-Luinenburg on state-directed industrialization, the relationship between economics and political power, and why we should care about the development of machine tools.
South Korea’s bold story of state-led development is how every wealthy country on Earth has industrialized. State capacity is necessary to coordinate long-term industrial investments.
Chinese political theorist Jiang Shigong, accused of acting as the Party’s black hand in Hong Kong, has been quietly building a vision for a new world order that appears tolerant of difference—but with Chinese power at its center.
I originally planned a literary excursion to famously stable Chile. Instead, I came to a country engulfed in protests, where trains pass by the wreckage without a word. From Santiago and Valparaiso to the Atacama Desert, I delved into a conflict for the future.
Ash Milton interviews Jason Crawford about the development of progress studies as a new field of research and community.
Civility is critical to collective self-government. But the formal structure of self-government has no way to maintain it against political division and private interest. Civility can only be restored by some outside intervention.
Jonah Bennett and Wolf Tivy discuss why the bachelor’s degree is the new citizenship, and what it would take to actually build a status-generating alternative to the university.
Wolf Tivy and Pasha Kamyshev discuss Pasha’s latest article on AI grand strategy, and the deeper foundations of the problem: we are building digital totalitarianism, but we don’t know how to reconcile that with creating a good society.