Until the 700s, Scandinavians barely appear in European history. Then they suddenly reach Paris, Constantinople and America. Why? Three things: 1) Rome fell and left a void in naval power in the North Sea. England was a backwater, and the continent was busy with land wars. That left the Scandinavians free to move. 2) Better farming techniques, including iron tools, grew Scandinavia's population, but there was little land, and it could never be sold outside the family. Soon, many Scandinavians were growing up landless and futureless. 3) The richest men had several wives, so most low-status men had no access to wealth or women. There was lots of sea, and nobody else controlled it. So young men took to it to raid. The lesson: In general, try to avoid having lots of incels with no future prospects, unless you have a way to channel them. substack.com/@tomaspueyo/not…

What are we researching for? AI may increasingly provide us with truths. It may even grant us knowledge. So what is left for us? This: I want to understand things for myself. Stuff I find interesting. I want to have some grasp of how things work, how they fit together, and what reality is like. That understanding is more than memorizing formulas or lists of facts. What the alien machines extract from the knowledge mines still means nothing to me until I personally do the hard work of understanding it. Of course that is true for human-generated knowledge too—the library is filled with our ideas and it sits inert and waiting for me to grapple with their words. That is where scholars have always gone to learn. As long as we care for understanding, even if for ourselves alone, there is something meaningful for us to do. That the machines cannot take away. 📷 hilariusbookbinder.substack.…

My new blog post is an essay about the formation of the US common school system, which was responsible for helping to establish the American republic during a period in the early 19th century when its survival was in doubt.  The essay is an extended excerpt from the second chapter of my book, Someone Has to Fail. I'm posting it here for two reasons.  First, the common schools saved the republic during a time of dire threat.  It's a great story of how important schools are to the nation state.  In the 1820s and 30s, the fragile US polity was shaken by the market revolution that would come to destroy the traditional pattern of social, economic, political, and moral life in the country.  Challenges to the survival of a social order don't get any more serious than this. The second reason for this post is that it provides a window into one of my all-time favorite books, Paul Johnson's 1978 classic, A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, NY, 1815 to 1837.  Everyone should read this book, which will teach you more about the historical interaction between economy and society than anything else I have encountered. The Rochester case is compelling because the market didn't intrude on the town through a gradual process.  Instead the market arrived on a canal boat one day in 1825, when the Erie Canal reached Rochester.  Suddenly the town was connected through cheap transportation to New York City and the world.  The consequences were traumatic, turning the entire social order upside down.  And, since this was the early 19th century, the community experienced this upheaval as a religious crisis.  One of the great evangelists in US history, Charles Grandison Finney, came to the rescue, launching an enormous religious revival that became the centerpiece of the Second Great Awakening and turned upstate New York into what people came to call the Burned Over District. Drawing on Johnson's analysis, I show how the common school movement was able to take the lead in establishing a model for creating community within the radically individualist setting of a market economy.  Take all of the youths in a community and expose them to a shared educational experience that would provide them with the values and norms and skills required for them to be self-regulating members of the new social order, capable of balancing the self-interested economic behavior of a market actor with the civic virtue of a republican citizen. davidlabaree.com

This Poem Will Hit You Where You Live nytimes.com/interactive/2026… via @NYTimes

My new blog post is an essay about the formation of the US common school system, which was responsible for helping to establish the American republic during a period in the early 19th century when its survival was in doubt.  The essay is an extended excerpt from the second chapter of my book, Someone Has to Fail. I'm posting it here for two reasons.  First, the common schools saved the republic during a time of dire threat.  It's a great story of how important schools are to the nation state.  In the 1820s and 30s, the fragile US polity was shaken by the market revolution that would come to destroy the traditional pattern of social, economic, political, and moral life in the country.  Challenges to the survival of a social order don't get any more serious than this. The second reason for this post is that it provides a window into one of my all-time favorite books, Paul Johnson's 1978 classic, A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, NY, 1815 to 1837.  Everyone should read this book, which will teach you more about the historical interaction between economy and society than anything else I have encountered. The Rochester case is compelling because the market didn't intrude on the town through a gradual process.  Instead the market arrived on a canal boat one day in 1825, when the Erie Canal reached Rochester.  Suddenly the town was connected through cheap transportation to New York City and the world.  The consequences were traumatic, turning the entire social order upside down.  And, since this was the early 19th century, the community experienced this upheaval as a religious crisis.  One of the great evangelists in US history, Charles Grandison Finney, came to the rescue, launching an enormous religious revival that became the centerpiece of the Second Great Awakening and turned upstate New York into what people came to call the Burned Over District. Drawing on Johnson's analysis, I show how the common school movement was able to take the lead in establishing a model for creating community within the radically individualist setting of a market economy.  Take all of the youths in a community and expose them to a shared educational experience that would provide them with the values and norms and skills required for them to be self-regulating members of the new social order, capable of balancing the self-interested economic behavior of a market actor with the civic virtue of a republican citizen. davidlabaree.com

How My Thinking about School Reform Has Changed Over Decades (Part 1) larrycuban.wordpress.com/202… via @CubanLarry

The Greatest Era of Technological Innovation in History: 1867-1914 How a remarkable burst of inventions laid the foundations for a century of material progress Michael Magoon frompovertytoprogress.substa…

Victorian elites stayed in bed until the afternoon There’s more than one way to rule the world open.substack.com/pub/worksi…

My new blog post is about -- of all things -- patriotism, which has picked up a bad reputation lately.  It's associated with jingoism, right wing causes, and efforts to whitewash the bad parts of American history.  Meanwhile wokeness has promoted the view that Americans have nothing to be proud of, since this is a country founded on the principles of racism and settler colonialism. But, as Rich Cohen points out in this essay from the Wall Street Journal, Bill Murray's character in the film Stripes offers us an alternative take on patriotism that is neither triumphalist nor shamefaced.  Here's how Murray puts it: “We’re not Watusi,” Murray tells his fellow grunts in a moment of disunity and crisis. “We’re not Spartans. We’re Americans, with a capital ‘A,’ huh? You know what that means? Do ya? That means that our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world. We are the wretched refuse. We’re the underdog. We’re mutts!…But there’s no animal that’s more faithful, that’s more loyal, more lovable than the mutt.” I love this take on patriotism.  Gotta see that movie again. davidlabaree.com

Guilfoyle was an Einstein of avarice and an avatar of Trump. The rap against her is that she crassly exploited her ambassadorship for pleasure and profit, as a recent series of reports in The Wall Street Journal detailed. But with her fame-hungry dreams and money-ravenous schemes, she didn’t violate the Trump ethos. She paid tribute to it. She didn’t contradict the Trump brand. She was its gaudy, greedy hood ornament. nytimes.com/2026/10/19/opini…

My new blog post is about -- of all things -- patriotism, which has picked up a bad reputation lately.  It's associated with jingoism, right wing causes, and efforts to whitewash the bad parts of American history.  Meanwhile wokeness has promoted the view that Americans have nothing to be proud of, since this is a country founded on the principles of racism and settler colonialism. But, as Rich Cohen points out in this essay from the Wall Street Journal, Bill Murray's character in the film Stripes offers us an alternative take on patriotism that is neither triumphalist nor shamefaced.  Here's how Murray puts it: “We’re not Watusi,” Murray tells his fellow grunts in a moment of disunity and crisis. “We’re not Spartans. We’re Americans, with a capital ‘A,’ huh? You know what that means? Do ya? That means that our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world. We are the wretched refuse. We’re the underdog. We’re mutts!…But there’s no animal that’s more faithful, that’s more loyal, more lovable than the mutt.” I love this take on patriotism.  Gotta see that movie again. davidlabaree.com

The transformation of the American upper class One of our least noticed revolutions, and why it is at the root of many of today's problems. frompovertytoprogress.substa…

Christopher Columbus and the Tyranny of Presentism A Call for Adult Memory The point is not to canonize Columbus. It is to remember him as he was: morally flawed, ambitious, consequential. Columbus Day should not be a hagiography. It should be a day of honest reflection on the ambiguity of human history. We can acknowledge the suffering unleashed by European conquest without pretending pre-Columbian societies were utopias. We can honor Indigenous resilience without erasing the courage it took to sail into the unknown. We can hold two truths at once: that Columbus’s voyage opened the door to both devastation and progress. The real tyranny is not Columbus’s, but ours, if we silence the past because it offends us. History’s purpose is not to flatter our moral vanity. It is to confront us with what humans are — and to remind us how fragile our moral gains really are. This Columbus Day, we should resist the tyranny of presentism. Not because Columbus was innocent, but because history never is. unfashiontruthec.substack.co…

This Is the Good Scenario? It’s easy enough to answer the question of whether we want A.I. that kills us all. We don’t. But do we want A.I. that enriches us all, if the cost is our control and comprehension over the world in which we live? What is the value to human beings maintaining primacy over our own struggle, and how do we weigh it against the easing of that struggle? I want the cures and the theorems and even, on some level, the capable digital assistants. And I also believe the struggle for human progress is essential to the human story, and even the human soul. nytimes.com/2026/10/18/opini… via @NYTOpinion