In 2007, the Watson Affair – the worldwide character assassination and exclusion from public life of Dr. James Watson, the brilliant, Nobel Prize-winning scientist co-credited with the discovery of DNA – shocked the global public in an early episode of what would come to be called “cancel culture.” Watson was an early and very public victim of incipient wokeism: a warning to others who might be tempted to dissent from favored ideologies of expression and behavior. With the Watson Affair, W...

Since the 1960s, the West has moved ever-leftwards. 'Equality' and ‘feelings' are central to the New Religion that rejects all traditional values. Yet beneath the institutionally dominant ‘Left' stews a growing and restless ‘Right’. How has this fractured situation come about? What will the future hold?In The Past is a Future Country, the authors trace it back to the Industrial Revolution. Darwinian selection massively weakened, meaning that, for the first time in history, the selfish, sic...

We are becoming less intelligent. This is the shocking yet fascinating message of At Our Wits' End. The authors take us on a journey through the growing body of evidence that we are significantly less intelligent now than we were a hundred years ago. The research proving this is, at once, profoundly thought-provoking, highly controversial, and it’s currently only read by academics. But the authors are passionate that it cannot remain ensconced in the ivory tower any longer. With At Our Wit...

Geniuses are rare and exceptional people. The majority of the great ideas, discoveries and inventions of human history, which have allowed the development of civilization itself, were the products of geniuses.A genius combines extremely high intelligence with a unworldly, intuitive personality. Geniuses will seldom fit-into normal society, they will seldom want to. And we shouldn’t want them to, because it is their unusual and socially-difficult nature which drives...

Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States, with a More Detailed Account of the Lands of Utah is a seminal work authored by John Wesley Powell, first published in 1878. This comprehensive report was commissioned by the U.S. government to assess the vast, largely unexplored arid regions of the American West, with a particular focus on Utah. Powell, a renowned geologist and explorer, meticulously documents the geography, climate, water resources, and potential for agricultur...

How does university turn students into who they become? Why are student evangelicals such a significant and controversial force at so many universities? In many countries, university has become the main Rite of Passage between the child and adult worlds. University can be enjoyable and fascinating but also life-changing and traumatic. And at the exact time when a student's identity is the most challenged and uncertain, student evangelical groups are highly organised on many university camp...

Micro Middle Ages brings together five microhistorical case studies focusing on small or seemingly inconsequential evidence that leads to broader conclusions about medieval history and the way we do and understand history in general. Paul Dutton provides an overview of microhistorical approaches and theorizes about its use in pre-modern history. As opposed to studying history “from above” or history “from below,” Dutton shows the advantages for historians of doing history “from th...

Among the readings included are several existing letters by Emma (Einhard's wife), The Life of Charlemagne, and The History of His Relics. The latter work transports us into an almost unknown world as Einhard, the cool rationalist, arranges for a relic salesman, a veritable bone seller, to acquire saints’ relics from Italy for installation into his new church. The reader is taken on an intrigue-filled trip to Rome, where Einhard's men creep into churches at night to steal...

A New York Times Notable Book of 2020A Bloomberg Best Non-Fiction Book of 2020A Behavioral Scientist Notable Book of 2020A Human Behavior & Evolution Society Must-Read Popular Evolution Book of 2020A bold, epic account of how the co-evolution of psychology and culture created the peculiar Western mind that has profoundly shaped the modern wor...

A vivid portrait of the American prairie, which rivals the rainforest in its biological diversity and, with little notice, is disappearing even faster“This book describes—in loving, living prose—one of the world’s greatest and most important landscapes. And it does so while there’s still time to save some serious part of it.”—Bill McKibben, author of The End of NatureThe North American prairie is an ecological marvel, a lush carpet...

The West feels lost. Brexit, Trump, the coronavirus: we hurtle from one crisis to another, lacking definition, terrified that our best days are behind us.The central argument of this book is that we can only face the future with hope if we have a proper sense of tradition – political, social and religious. We ignore our past at our peril. The problem, argues Tim Stanley, is that the Western tradition is anti-tradition, that we have a habit of discarding old ways an...

How to get on well with people, how to deal with violence, how to adjust to losing someone you love? How to live?This question obsessed Renaissance nobleman Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-92), who wrote free-roaming explorations of his thought and experience, unlike anything written before. Into these essays he put whatever was in his head: his tastes in wine and food, his childhood memories, the way his dog's ears twitched when it was dreaming, events in the app...